Effective IT service management (ITSM) is critical for modern enterprises. Two key components of a mature practice are the ITSM service catalog and configuration management database (CMDB). In this post, we’ll explore how Jira Service Management (JSM) provides powerful native tools to implement service catalogs and CMDBs, enabling teams to deliver streamlined, high-value services.

For an example of the impact of a scaled ITSM practice, read about a major JSM implementation at an iconic luxury retailer.

This is the second in a three-part series covering ITSM principles and applying them using JSM:

• Enabling ITSM Change Management With JSM
• Streamline Your ITSM—Service Catalog and CMDB Powered by JSM
• Perfecting Customer Management Using JSM

The role and importance of ITSM service catalogs

A service catalog is a centralized list of all the services and solutions IT provides to the business. Well-defined service catalogs offer many benefits:

• Streamlined request creation and fulfillment. Categorizing requests into services simplifies triage and handling for service agents.
• Enhanced value to the business. Efficient request management frees up resources to work on higher-value initiatives.
• Foundational for ITSM accountability and governance. The service catalog links requests and changes to defined services with owners.
• Facilitates SLAs monitoring. The service catalog can define unique SLAs per service like time to first response.
• Integrates with change, incident, and problem management. Problems, changes, and incidents are associated with affected services in the catalog.

Within the ITIL framework, the service catalog is critical for mature service management. It is the central repository detailing the services IT provides.

Examples of services

ITSM service catalogs categorize requests at a high level. Examples include:

• Hardware provisioning: laptops, workstations, printer setup
• Software provisioning: installs, upgrades, licensing
• Network services: VPN, WiFi, access provisioning
• Business application support: Jira, Salesforce, custom apps
• Cloud services: AWS, Azure, VM provisioning and management
• Data services: reporting, analytics, business intelligence
• Disaster recovery: backups, redundancy planning and testing

The specifics will vary across organizations based on size, industry, and technology landscape. Larger entities will have more extensive catalogs. The key is balancing detail while maintaining usability.

Defining and refining the ITSM service catalog

Developing an optimal service catalog requires discovery, planning, and refinement. Starting from a basic list, teams should:

• Identify value streams from the customer perspective
• Map request types to service categories
• Define service tiers like L1, L2, L3
• Assign owners and points of contact
• Outline the scope covered for each service

This exercise enables organizations to right-size their catalogs. Too few categories creates gaps; too many becomes unwieldy. The goal is partitioning requests into logical groupings that make fulfillment straightforward.

Periodic reevaluation of the catalog ensures it evolves appropriately as the business and technology landscape changes. The service catalog is a living framework that guides daily operations.

For more context around building an ITSM practice using the ITIL framework, download our white paper, The Key to Unlocking Optimized ITSM.

Leveraging Jira Service Management’s service catalog

JSM provides built-in functionality to define and manage catalogs. The “Services” section enables teams to:

• Create and categorize services
• Define service tiers like L1, L2, L3
• Assign service owners and points of contact
• Set up SLAs per service (like response time)
• Link services to changes, incidents, and problems
• Integrate with OpsGenie for on-call scheduling

This service catalog capability streamlines request fulfillment. Customers easily submit requests for defined services. Agents can quickly triage and resolve based on established workflows.

JSM also connects services to broader ITSM processes through its native integration with the Insight Asset Management app. Teams can build extensive CMDBs linking all IT assets and configurations to defined services and owners.

The role and value of a CMDB

A configuration management database provides a centralized repository of all IT infrastructure and assets. It tracks relationships between components to provide a single source of truth.

CMDBs deliver several benefits:

• Effective asset management: inventory hardware, lifecycles, utilization
• Streamlined incident resolution: understand downstream impacts of outages
• Informed change management: identify risks and affected services/users
• Continuous improvement: optimize costs based on utilization data

Within ITSM, the CMDB is the definitive record of your IT environment configuration. It integrates tightly with incident, problem, and change management processes.

Types of configuration items (CIs)

CMDBs track various types of CIs including:

• Hardware: computers, mobile devices, network gear
• Software: operating systems, applications, licenses
• Cloud services: AWS instances, Azure VMs, custom cloud platforms
• Organizational: users, departments, locations

CMDB best practices

Effective CMDB management involves:

• Federated data integration from multiple sources
• Automation to keep CIs updated in real-time
• Intuitive interfaces tailored to user needs
• Scheduled audits and reconciliation

Proactive data management is key. Allowing the CMDB to become outdated severely reduces its value. Integrations and workflows should ensure accuracy and completeness at all times.

Larger organizations will often manage multiple federated CMDBs integrated into a single system. JSM’s native integration makes consolidating data easy.

Integrate ITSM service catalogs and CMDBs using JSM

Jira Service Management brings CMDBs and service catalogs together into a single intuitive interface.

The asset management capabilities provided by Insight Asset Management integrate directly with JSM’s service catalog. Teams can easily build extensive records of all IT components and map them to defined services and owners.

Key features include:

• Customizable asset schemas: Build CMDBs tailored to your environment
• Federated data integration: Sync data from multiple sources
• CMDB-driven request forms: Assets assigned to users prepopulate
• Automation to update CIs: Changes can trigger CMDB updates

These capabilities enable mature ITSM practices. With JSM, you get powerful service catalog and CMDB functionalities built right into a single trusted platform designed for enterprise service delivery.

Real-world use case

Imagine a help desk agent receives a request to replace a broken laptop. The user simply selects the hardware asset assigned to them when submitting the ticket.

Behind the scenes, the integrated CMDB automatically attaches all relevant details like serial number, warranty status, specs, etc. The agent has all the info they need to rapidly resolve the issue.

Upon resolution, automation can update the asset’s status. The CMDB self-maintains with no manual effort required.

Realize the potential of mature ITSM

Mature IT service management, guided by frameworks like ITIL, requires extensive use of service catalogs and CMDBs. ITSM powered by Jira Service Management provides innovative native tools specially designed to help IT teams leverage these best practices.

With simplified service offering definitions, comprehensive configuration data, and the latest service management technology, teams can deliver efficient, business-focused services. 

Don’t miss the thorough demo of how to leverage JSM to optimize your service catalog and CMDB. Watch the second half of the webinar here!

According to the Service Desk Institute, 68% of organizations had implemented Enterprise Service Management (ESM) strategies as of mid-2021—a 58% increase from two years prior. But what is ESM? And should it matter to you and your business?

This post explores the concept of Enterprise Service Management and the core elements necessary for ESM success. As you read, it’s important to remember there’s no one-size-fits-all solution—businesses should tailor ESM to their unique business needs.

This article is an excerpt from our free white paper, Your Practical Guide to Enterprise Service Management. Download it now to dive deeper.

What Is ESM (Enterprise Service Management)?

ESM stands for Enterprise Service Management and is often defined as “the use of ITSM (IT Service Management) principles to support all business functions across the enterprise.” However, we disagree with the limitations inherent in that definition.

ESM is not an offshoot of ITSM; the two are very different in both their approach and their  desired outcomes.

It is common for IT organizations to have established ITSM processes in place that may serve as a launching point for ESM in the broader organization. However, it’s challenging to apply IT’s relatively complex processes, tool components, and governance requirements to all business units. Team members in Marketing, HR, Finance, and other groups may become overwhelmed by changes, leading to lower ESM adoption rates and failed initiatives.

Therefore, a more appropriate definition of Enterprise Service Management is:

An optimized combination of the right software solutions, well-thought-out processes and workflows, and customized automation that effectively supports a customer-centric approach to each service an internal business unit undertakes.

In some cases, certain aspects of an existing ITSM solution may carry over to the larger ESM program, but only if it fully supports and translates to each business unit’s goals and limitations.

Before analyzing and developing any solutions, it’s beneficial for an organization to consult with a partner experienced in successfully delivering ESM.

ESM Puts the Customer First

It’s important to recognize that a successful adoption of Enterprise Service Management requires each of the organization’s business units to change their views about what they do and who they do it for.

To support streamlined workflows and processes that are truly customer-centric, the team’s culture must emphasize providing the very best service to each customer in an efficient manner and they should optimize the following concepts:

• Services – Internal business units must view the services and related deliverables they produce as products, just as the company has concrete products and services they sell to external customers.
• Customers – An ESM team’s customers include individuals, business units, vendors, and other stakeholders that benefit from the services the teams provide.
• Value Stream – The ESM value stream includes every interaction that takes place between a customer’s request and the delivery of value to that customer. This may include one individual’s activity or the collaboration of multiple departments.

The Core Elements of an ESM Solution

An optimal ESM program includes some combination of the following five core elements:

1. Portal

A centralized portal is the software hub for any ESM program. The portal facilitates service requests, manages ongoing service tasks, and maintains appropriate governance throughout the service lifecycle.

An optimal ESM solution will allow for customized entry points for each business unit, tailored to their customers’ specific needs.

Some examples of popular solutions successfully used as ESM portals are:

• Atlassian Jira Service Management
• Freshworks Freshservice
• Ivanti ESM
• ServiceNow ESM
• BMC Helix
• IFS Assyst

An effective Enterprise Service Management portal solution must include:

• Request intake available to all internal customers. A user-friendly interface should provide all the necessary actionable information without complicating requests. Similarly, a multi-channel approach will allow users to submit requests via email, messaging apps, chat programs, and more.
• A ticketing function that makes each incoming service request its own unit that can be assigned, managed, and closed. It must store all applicable information regarding a ticket’s tasks and status.
• Basic automation functionality such as chatbots, automatic ticket routing, and workflows that trigger necessary notifications, assignments, and reporting based on a given ticket.
• Reporting and governance capabilities such as status reports, open and closed ticket tracking, and archival resources.

2. Workflow

In this context, a workflow is any predetermined path through which a service request passes. It includes task completion, notification of appropriate stakeholders, and the production of any necessary governance or reports.

While workflows can be completely manual, an effective ESM workflow will include as much  automation as possible while maintaining optimal control over service activities.

Explore how AI-powered service management can take ESM automation and efficiency to a whole new level!

3. Service Catalog

An ESM service catalog is a universal list of services that can be requested through various internal teams. By employing naming conventions and referring to supporting database material, requests can follow a preset workflow, streamlining the request and fulfillment process.

4. Permissions, Approvals, and Notifications

The ESM system should support user permissions based on the needs and security limitations imposed on various business units and request types. A common use case is HR requests being only visible to HR teams.

Approval capabilities can empower or prevent users from taking certain actions. For example, if a given service must be approved by management before work can begin, the ticket can be automatically assigned to that manager. No one else will be able to manually move the ticket to the next step.

The system should also send notifications via email, messaging program, or some other agreed-upon means to keep stakeholders apprised of a ticket’s status or any necessary assigned action.

5. Reporting

A successful ESM solution must incorporate reporting that is robust enough to monitor both current and historical requests. Ideally, the team will use this reporting to routinely inspect the ESM practice and support continual improvement.

Additionally, In highly regulated industries or any organization beholden to compliance regulations, reporting must meet the necessary standards to support auditability.

There is No One-size-fits-all ESM Program

It’s important to recognize that an Enterprise Service Management program does not need to include all of the elements listed above. Nor does every feature included in a given ESM portal solution need to be leveraged for the program to be successful.

Rather, each business unit should review all the available options and determine which core  elements are necessary to fulfill their needs and the needs of the other business units that  depend on them.

A successful program will be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

ESM Implementation for Success

As an organization grows, so does the complexity of its teams and business units. To maintain smooth operations and provide stellar customer service, your organization may need to implement a software solution that enables ESM.

This article is an excerpt from our free white paper, Your Practical Guide to Enterprise Service Management. Download it now to dive deeper.

Atlassian’s Jira Service Management (JSM) is a widely used IT service management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) tool. It brings together IT, operations, development, and business teams to increase efficiency and encourage cross-team collaboration. With JSM, teams have immediate access to workflow automation to help them triage, track, and resolve internal issues faster.

Atlassian launched Jira Service Desk in 2013 but soon found that 40 percent of their customers adopted it for internal requests. To facilitate this use and harness the power of IT service management (ITSM), Atlassian then launched JSM for comprehensive service delivery.

In this way, Jira Service Desk evolved into JSM to provide ITSM capabilities within the same tool. This enabled service desk operations to cater to ITSM activities, including incident management, knowledge management, and change management.

JSM supports a modern, effective, and scalable approach to service desk operations, and ITSM at large. But like any tool you’re working with, you can optimize JSM to improve the efficiency of your service desk operations.

This article highlights best practices you can implement to help refine JSM implementation and boost service desk operational efficiency.

Best Practices for Optimizing JSM Service Desk Operations

A service desk is a communications platform that allows users to interact with various teams or departments within the organization. While service desks (previously called help desks) were initially designed for technical teams to resolve issues, now even non-technical teams have adopted this approach.

A service desk aims to provide high-quality service to users as fast as possible. It focuses on offering top-notch customer service, whether that customer is an internal employee or a customer outside the organization.

JSM’s flexible, collaborative approach to ITSM and ESM enables your service desk to better streamline your service delivery processes for both customer-facing and staff-facing services. Some of JSM’s features and benefits include:

• Automation tools to track and resolve customer and employee issues
• An extensive knowledge base and self-service portals
• Rich reporting features to gain actionable insights into service trends in your organization

But for your service desk operations to run efficiently and effectively, you need to search for opportunities for optimization and implement them.

The following sections highlight four best practices that can help you optimize your JSM service desk operations and improve its return on investment (ROI).

Minimize Toil With Automation

You can use JSM’s automation capabilities to reduce the burden on your teams and free up time. This allows organizations to automate manual, repetitive tasks to improve their efficiency.

For example, you don’t have to manually assign team members to specific tickets. Instead, use JSM’s automation feature to assign the next ticket to the team member with the least workload. This feature avoids overburdening a specific individual and lets your team resolve tickets faster.

Automation also leads to significant cost savings, and an improved customer experience. Automating customer requests or incidents means your personnel spend less time on manual work and can instead focus on more critical tasks.

Jira Service Management’s rules function makes automation easy. The function has three components:

• Trigger: the action that triggers the automation
• Condition: a condition to narrow the rule’s scope via the IF condition
• Action: what happens when the rule runs after meeting the condition

Additionally, rules can include Branches, an optional layer that allows for executing repeated conditions and actions on groups of tickets

The rules function makes it easy to automate manual tasks at scale. For instance, you might schedule a quick search for tickets with a “Waiting for Customer” status every two days to help you follow up with those customers and resolve their issues faster.

You can identify other points of contention by analyzing your ITSM workflows. This process involves spending time combing through every workflow in your team, which makes it tedious. But it saves you time, money, and resources in the long term.

You can simplify this process by working with an Atlassian Solution Partner like Cprime to pinpoint which tasks can be automated. Atlassian Solution Partners can also review current processes and suggest improvements beyond automation.

Maintain Accurate SLAs in JSM

You can use JSM’s reporting feature to view progress toward your service level agreements (SLAs), and you can define, implement, adjust, and review SLAs within the same tool.

By default, the JSM dashboard provides access to four reports: Workload, Satisfaction, Requests deflected, and Requests resolved. These reports help determine how quickly requests are handled and ascertain current customer satisfaction levels.

You can also customize these reports to show specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ve deemed essential. For example, you might create a report to see how and when your team handles specific issues. Based on the mean time to resolution (MTTR), you can decide if they’re meeting your SLAs on time. This data helps inform decision-making about staffing levels and helps you identify areas where specific goals are unmet, and where more resources or training may be necessary.

Customer service performance reports also offer insights into customer expectations and preferences. These reports help you identify areas for improvement and incorporate new strategies to increase customer satisfaction scores and improve service delivery.

These reporting features help you make informed decisions using real-time performance data. You can use the resulting insights to build customer trust and give ITSM teams a clear direction for meeting SLAs.

Build and Maintain a Comprehensive Knowledge Base

Too often, customers or employees register support tickets for minor issues, which increases the load on your team and results in redundant tickets. Avoid this issue by leveraging Confluence’s knowledge base feature—a powerful tool for companies to empower employees and customers.

Confluence enables enterprises to build a robust knowledge base with features like advanced search, page tree, best practice templates, and, most importantly, JSM integration. Use this knowledge base to create a comprehensive library of resources, including:

• How-to guides
• Troubleshooting articles
• Frequently asked questions
• Process documentation
• Product documentation

Customers and internal teams can access this information, enabling a self-serve option. A recent study found that 69 percent of customers want to solve issues independently, making this option a great fit for both customers and support teams.

A solid knowledge base also makes it easier for internal teams to find answers without creating new tickets or contacting support. By integrating JSM with Confluence, you can divert repetitive support tickets using a self-service document that details how to troubleshoot them. This fix reduces time spent on troubleshooting issues, resulting in a more productive workforce.

Templates are available

JSM and Confluence offer several templates to get you started, and the option to create custom templates to support your ITSM practice. It also helps you update resources on the go, ensuring everybody can access timely and accurate information. Plus, IT teams can create documentation within the service desk in real time, making it easier to share the articles without disrupting the agent’s workflow.

Monitor analytics with reports

Another valuable feature of the knowledge base is how it allows you to monitor the analytics of each article or guide. For example, you might use this to identify topics that receive more traffic or topics that deflect requests.

Here are two key reports you should look out for:

• Requests deflected: how often customers found an article helpful enough that they no longer needed to register a ticket
• Requests resolved: A summary of requests resolved with an article, without an article, and deflected with an article.

These reports help you identify valuable topics and areas that need more resources. An internal study by Atlassian found that users that use this integration can deflect 45 percent of their customer service requests. Ultimately, it enables you to reduce the number of support tickets, address issues faster, and make your IT teams more efficient.

Track Assets and Configurations with JSM Assets

In 2021, 62 percent of IT professionals used an issue-tracking tool like JSM as their single source of truth during incidents, particularly for individuals leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to trigger incidents.

JSM’s Assets feature is one reason JSM makes such an excellent incident management tool. Formerly known as Insights, the Assets capability helps correlate specific assets and configuration items (CI) to a particular issue. As a result, incident teams can focus on resolution instead of spending time figuring out which IT assets an incident affects.

The Assets feature is also beneficial when resolving complex incidents or changes with a lot of related CIs. Incident managers can determine whether the issue is driven by a single CI or caused by several related CIs, and teams can quickly identify potential root causes by linking objects associated with the incident. JSM’s Assets feature even helps with change management, since you can view the impact of changes before they’re made and avoid expensive mistakes.

Use JSM Assets to manage your organization’s IT inventory, too. The Assets feature helps track hardware equipment, software licenses, and other physical resources in one centralized location. This centralization makes it easy to assign assets to specific users and monitor their usage in real time. It also allows for better budget forecasting and resource allocation across various departments within the organization, helping you maximize efficiency and minimize the risk associated with changes and deployments.

Conclusion

Service desks are critical to effective ITSM operations as a central point of contact for users to request and resolve issues. They operate as valuable triage zones where incidents can be quickly identified and addressed.

Jira Service Management’s high-velocity ITSM capabilities enable you to streamline your ITSM operations easily. But to maximize your JSM implementation and deliver the highest quality service experiences possible, you must follow the best practices outlined here.

As an Atlassian Solution Partner, we’re experts in all things JSM. With deep technical expertise and partnerships with multiple companies in the Atlassian Marketplace, we can optimize your service desk operations for maximum efficiency.

Get in touch with Cprime today to learn more about how JSM can streamline your service desk and ITSM operations.

The IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework provides a series of best practices to help businesses align their IT service delivery with their business needs. It has become the standard for IT Service Management (ITSM) because it provides a comprehensive, optimized, flexible way to manage and quantify the effectiveness of service delivery.

If you’re looking to rebuild your organization’s workflow on an ITIL foundation, an Atlassian Solution Partner can help optimize your redesign by integrating certified ITIL 4 tools. Notably, the Atlassian Cloud suite is a powerful, ITIL-aligned toolset for modernizing your ITSM governance.

Jira Service Management (JSM) remains a crucial player in the Atlassian arsenal. It includes many default features to help streamline your service project with industry-standard workflows, all of which meet regulatory requirements right out of the box. JSM also provides advanced customizations, including comprehensive metrics monitoring, which enables you to tailor your ITSM processes to your unique business needs.

To ensure comprehensive alignment with ITIL, look no further than JSM.

Adhering to ITIL v4 Best Practices in JSM

Unlike previous iterations, ITIL v4 favors a more holistic approach that integrates modern developments, like Agile frameworks and DevOps. Although many concepts central to ITIL remain focused on ITSM, ITIL v4 takes a broader view in order to assess how components and processes cooperate across your entire organization to create value.

Atlassian incorporated this practice-oriented mindset to develop JSM’s feature set, designing it around practices implemented by best-performing teams. Successful teams emphasized:

• Continual improvement with retrospectives
• Agile project management to speed up project delivery
• Knowledge management to empower team culture
• Customer-centered service desk and request management
• Adaptive incident management
• Streamlined change control through automation and collaboration
• Continuous delivery for deployment management
• Integrated software development and operations teams
• Exploring AI-powered service management to uplevel efficiency gains

JSM is ITIL 4 Certified

You can maximize the value of your ITIL implementation by using ITSM tools certified by Pink Elephant Inc., which is an Axelos Licensed Software Assessor. A tool with a  PinkVERIFY ITIL v4 Certification has shown that its functionality, integrations, terminology, and documentation are compatible with ITIL v4 practices.

Currently, Pink Elephant can assess an ITSM tool for compatibility with 22 of the 34 ITIL v4 practices. JSM is certified as meeting the requirements for seven of these practices:

• Change Enablement
• Incident Management
• IT Asset Management
• Knowledge Management
• Service Catalog Management
• Service Configuration Management
• Service Request Management

JSM now provides this functionality out of the box, combined with Atlassian’s excellent third-party integration capabilities to conform to your organization’s specific workflow needs.

Implementing ITSM Using JSM

Starting a new project in JSM gives you a flexible template to serve as your foundation. A default project includes a service catalog, ITIL workflows, and adjustable reports to provide advanced business intelligence. As an Atlassian Cloud product, JSM also neatly integrates with your knowledge base in Confluence and with cloud-ready apps and integrations on the Atlassian Marketplace.

As an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we’ve developed a set of ITSM best practices based on our experience working with a variety of teams. These practices are based on ITIL v4 and are best delivered using Atlassian tools, including JSM.

Involving and Empowering Your Developers

Empower your developers by setting automation policies to deploy low-risk changes and flag higher-risk changes for additional approval.

Empowered to push minor changes, your developers can also remain focused on high-value work while Bitbucket Pipelines or a third-party CI/CD tool automatically logs their changes. This solution provides a safe way to eliminate operator error while creating records you’ll be able to reference during incident resolution or problem management.

Incident Management

JSM includes a powerful suite of features for prioritizing, responding to, and analyzing incidents. It can assess a range of issues, from those requiring a single team member to interruptions warranting organization-wide involvement. Once alerted by your monitoring systems, JSM automatically notifies the scheduled on-call team. Your team can then link issues together on the fly and set a priority level for the incident.

Staying in Touch

JSM can integrate with SMS, email, voice, and chat channels. In short, it acts as a centralized notification system and source of updates for responders. Channel creation is automatable and templatized, so your teams can collaborate without managing communications overhead.

For example, while your operations team joins an automatically configured video conference, your public relations team can receive updates from the main Slack channel and periodically check in via a separate Zoom conference to collaborate on a public statement.

Likewise, even more comprehensive incident management capabilities are available via optional integrations with OpsGenie. Several integrations are already available out-of-the-box, or you can develop custom integrations using the OpsGenie API. These will allow you to integrate alerts, configure users, schedules, and teams on your OpsGenie account from external applications.

Rich Data

If a major incident occurs, your team members can access the associated timeline tagged with all the details needed to make informed decisions under pressure. JSM combines manually entered data from user reports and responders with automatically collected data from your monitoring tools, logs, and integrated communication tools. From a single interface, you gain full, time-stamped insight into proposed and implemented actions, involved team members, affected assets and configuration items in your configuration management database (CMDB), and related user tickets.

Your team can also begin analyzing root causes by viewing recent code changes to determine what might have contributed to the incident and what downstream effects it might have. To keep your customers and other external stakeholders informed, an integrated Statuspage can trigger a notification on the customer portal.

Ongoing Collaboration

Once the incident is resolved, your teams can continue to collaborate using JSM’s centralized tools and data in their problem management practices. Team members can create a change ticket or a problem ticket in JSM at any point during the incident response project or during the problem management stage afterward.

Problem Management

JSM’s strong automated documentation and visibility features make it easier to diagnose problems. Templates simplify creating auditable post-incident reports, and your teams can export directly to Confluence to create a central knowledge repository for your developers and operations teams, public-facing teams, and other business stakeholders.

Visibility, Agility, and Costs

Once a problem is diagnosed, your IT team can access other post-incident reviews and the developer backlog in Jira Software to see if the development team is already working on a fix. If there’s no existing problem in the queue, team members can create a change ticket.

Grouping related work streams reduces redundant work and reveals a more accurate picture of the costs incurred by an incident and its workarounds or fixes. The extra visibility also enables your teams to fix problems or apply existing workarounds to new problems more quickly, ensuring that solutions are open for continued improvement.

JSM comes with a really helpful post-incident review template (process and document) that is ITIL-compliant out of the box.

The Value of a Partnership

ITIL is a proven, stable, and extensible foundation for service management in any industry. The best practices it describes accommodate a wide range of implementations and toolsets, of which the Atlassian Cloud suite of tools remains a prominent solution.

Jira Service Management (JSM) gives your team a centralized ITSM platform suitable for an organization of any size. JSM is PinkVERIFY ITIL 4-certified and particularly powerful for implementing incident management and problem management practices. Teams using JSM can collaborate across your organization and work seamlessly in a shared real-time environment containing all the information required to respond to incidents, correlate effects with new or existing problems, and report on your service management processes for communication with stakeholders.

As an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, with an ITSM specialization, Cprime offers a set of ITIL 4-oriented templates to enhance JSM’s out-of-the-box functionality. Our tooling experts will help you adapt Atlassian solutions to your business needs or help design and implement custom solutions to ensure your whole workflow benefits from ITIL best practices.

If your organization isn’t yet using Atlassian Cloud, we’ll partner with you in migrating and future-proofing your existing tools. Typical cloud migration assistants might leave your IT teams with an unspecified backlog of cleanup work, but your partners at Cprime will handle the complexities for you — from licensing, design, and impact analysis to the hidden configuration details often left unresolved until they’re cleared from the problem management queue.

Curious to see how ITIL could optimize your JSM experience? Contact Cprime ITSM experts to discuss your needs.

Want to dive deeper into JSM, ITSM, and ITIL? Download our white paper, Cprime and ITIL: The Key to Unlock Optimized ITSM.

If you work in a fast-paced business environment, you know how important it is to be responsive, collaborative, and efficient in delivering IT services. That’s where agile IT service management (ITSM) comes in.

By combining the flexibility of agile methodologies with the structure of ITSM processes, agile ITSM allows you to respond quickly to changing business needs while maintaining a high level of service quality.

To make agile ITSM a reality, organizations need a robust and flexible platform that supports agile methodologies and ITSM processes. The combination of Jira Service Management (JSM) and Jira Software fills that gap perfectly.

With customizable workflows, real-time notifications, and centralized reporting, JSM offers unparalleled visibility into ITSM processes. On the other hand, Jira Software provides an array of agile project management features, such as sprints, burndown charts, and agile boards, allowing teams to manage their projects easily.

When combined, Jira Software and JSM provide a powerful platform for agile ITSM by creating a synergistic environment for teams to work together seamlessly, share information, and optimize their processes to deliver high-quality IT services with speed and flexibility.

In this article, we’ll dive deeper into the capabilities of JSM and explore how it enables agile ITSM.

High-Velocity ITSM with JSM and Agile Methodologies

Agile methodology and the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework are often seen as incompatible due to their different origins and approaches. While Agile is mainly designed for software development, ITIL focuses on delivering and managing IT services.

Agile takes an incremental approach to software development that emphasizes flexibility, iterative development, collaboration, and customer satisfaction. On the other hand, ITSM frameworks, like ITIL, are a set of best practices emphasizing organization, workflow, and control.

The differences in scope and focus between the two methodologies can make it challenging to integrate them. However, there’s a growing trend towards incorporating agile principles into ITSM practices to make the best of both worlds. In fact, the recent ITIL 4 has evolved to include concepts of flexibility with suggestions to apply agile philosophies.

So how exactly does the combination of agile and ITSM work?

Agile ITSM: Combining Agility and Service

Agile ITSM is a concept that combines the principles of agile and ITSM to improve the delivery of IT services. It combines the flexibility of agile with the structure and processes of ITSM to create a more efficient and practical approach. It promotes the integration of agile principles—like working in short cycles, getting feedback early and often, and embracing change—with ITSM processes to plan, execute, and monitor IT services.

In agile ITSM, IT organizations use agile practices, such as iterative planning and delivery, continuous improvement, and collaboration, to improve the efficiency of ITSM processes. This approach enables IT organizations to deliver high-quality services responsive to changing business needs while improving the overall experience.

How JSM Bridges the Gap Between Agile and ITSM

JSM is an ITIL-certified service management platform that includes features such as incident management, problem management, change management, and service level agreements (SLAs). These features are crucial for ensuring stability and consistency in IT services, especially for mission-critical systems that can significantly impact the business.

By integrating JSM with agile tools like Jira Software, teams can ensure that their ITSM processes don’t get in the way of agile development but complement it.

Below are a few ways through which JSM can help adapt agile ITSM.

Seamless Ticket Creation and Integration

Incident tickets are the primary contact points among developers, the IT services team, and the operations team, so it’s important to have a streamlined process to help teams manage them effectively.

To do that, you need more than just an issue tracker. You need a comprehensive ticket management solution.

JSM provides that solution by giving teams everything they need to manage tickets effectively:

• It offers tools for tracking and managing tickets throughout their lifecycle.
• Ticket routing rules and escalation policies to help ensure agents never miss an update or lose track of an issue.
• Customizable templates allow agents to create new tickets quickly without spending time configuring every interaction they have with customers.

You can also link JSM tickets to Jira Software so teams can quickly identify the development requests associated with the respective incidents. This integration can help IT teams simplify identifying and fixing issues, reducing the time it takes to resolve incidents and improving overall service delivery.

Improved Visibility from the Ground Up

JSM gives you a single view of all service activity happening across your organization, from in-progress tickets to completed work. This means that teams no longer need to keep track of multiple systems for information about their projects or changes. You’ll be able to quickly find what you need, whether it’s an overview of your project or a list of tickets waiting for approval.

JSM also allows teams to create customizable dashboards that provide real-time insights into key metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This means you can quickly identify bottlenecks, monitor performance, and make data-driven decisions to accelerate deployment and problem resolution.

Powerful Incident Management Capabilities

The connectivity and integration opportunities between JSM, Jira Software, and Opsgenie provide powerful incident management capabilities.

Opsgenie can send real-time notifications to the respective IT teams about the incidents raised. JSM provides a centralized location for incident management and tracking, while Jira Software provides a platform for software teams to develop and deploy fixes quickly. With seamless connectivity between all three tools, IT teams can respond quickly to incidents and minimize downtime.

With Opsgenie’s integration with JSM, you can receive alerts from JSM, create workflows, and assign them directly from within JSM. This eliminates the need to switch between multiple tools while managing incidents in JSM.

JSM also integrates with Opsgenie and Jira to support alert escalation workflows. Whenever an alert is created in JSM, it will be automatically escalated by Opsgenie using predefined rules based on severity levels or priority queues.

Faster Response Time

It’s no secret that reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) is a key objective for many organizations, so it’s no surprise that this has been an area of focus for ITSM tools.

JSM enables the automation of routine tasks, which can help reduce MTTR and streamline ITSM processes. You can create custom automation rules and triggers in JSM that can be tailored to specific needs, such as automatically routing incidents to the appropriate teams based on predefined criteria.

AI-powered service management–both via Atlassian’s own AI virtual agent, or a custom AI experience–can do wonders as well.

You can also leverage JSM to reduce lead time and increase responsiveness through real-time dashboards and reports showing the current status of incidents, issues and problems.

Enhanced Cross-Functional Collaboration

One of the biggest challenges in ITSM is eliminating the siloed communication between teams and departments. As projects are assigned different priorities, they can often fall through the cracks.

JSM helps you break down these silos in various ways:

• You can create custom workflows to ensure each department has what it needs to complete its tasks efficiently.
• You can integrate workflows between departments—not just your development and operations teams but also your legal, HR, and finance teams.
• You can create multiple boards, allowing you to organize your work in a way that makes sense for your organization, whether by department, project, or priority level.
• You can combine JSM with Jira Software to make it easier for teams to collaborate and see what they need to do next, whether they’re looking after incidents or developing new features.

Integrated Metrics and Reporting Capabilities

The combination of JSM and Jira Software provides advanced reporting and analytics capabilities. Teams can continuously improve their performance by tracking KPIs such as response time, resolution rate, incident volume, and customer satisfaction score.

JSM and Jira also integrate with other Atlassian products, such as Jira Work Management and Confluence, so you can easily share data between projects. Such integrations help teams collaborate more effectively across departments while removing silos that often lead to bottlenecks.

Conclusion

Organizations must optimize their ITSM practices while maintaining agile methodologies to keep up with the evolving, fast-paced tech landscape. This is where the dynamic combination of Jira Software and JSM comes in.

What sets Jira Software and JSM apart from traditional ITSM tools is their shared foundation, which allows for easy integration and cooperation between the two platforms.

Together, these platforms provide a cohesive environment that enables teams to focus on delivering value, with the ability to track performance metrics and manage service requests. This, in turn, helps organizations to stay ahead of the competition by being more responsive, collaborative, and efficient in their ITSM practices.

Interested in understanding how an agile approach to JSM and Jira Software can improve your ITSM efficiency? Dig deeper with our free webinar-on-demand, How to Optimize ITSM with Atlassian’s Jira Service Management in the Cloud.