How Jira reports in Confluence has made one IT team shine
RadBee Ltd
Supporting better healthcare for all through agile quality management systems.
Since Cross Land Logistics (imaginary company) upgraded its internal IT service into Jira Service Management, the IT team had the wind in their back. With Jira reports keeping them all in synch, they moved in a fast-paced kanban flow. They even had enough time to add many runbooks and knowledge base articles. They were getting more momentum by the day. But, they could not help but notice that not everyone was with them. As much as they loved Jira, this love did not spread beyond the IT and software development teams. Try as they might, their peers from around the business did not become Jira fans. George from HR, for example, had a couple of walkthrough training sessions, but none of what he saw stuck. He was still unable to find any of the Jira reports he needed. And it was not only George. They recorded video tutorials, created knowledge base articles, ran hand-holding sessions, etc. Still- no one outside the official tech nerds was navigating to their Jira dashboard first thing in the morning. But- everyone seemed to be getting along fine with Confluence. From our front desk staff to our legal counsel, everyone is using the Confluence intranet, and the number of contributors is growing by the day. Jasmine, the head of IT, saw how this rift between those who are on Jira and those who are not is hurting them. First, it was difficult to show how much progress they had made when the data was buried inside Jira. Second, with users’ narrow access through the JSM portal, it was difficult for them to get the pulse of what was happening. This led to frequent follow-ups. As a result, the service team was expanding tons of time fielding questions arising from lack of visibility. They needed a way to?surface data?from inside Jira and put it in front of more people across the business. As a result, their internal customers will know more about the inner workings of the service team. This transparency will stoke confidence in the outcome and trust in the team. Jasmine knew trust was the secret sauce for long-term success. She had a vision of a strong IT team that would drive the organization forward. How did Jasmine close the rift between Jira and her internal customers? First, let’s have a closer look into their Jira Service Management.
The JSM configuration to streamline the IT onboarding of new recruits
One of the areas that needed better Jira reporting is the process of IT onboarding for new recruits. With well over twenty new staff every month, everyone is keen that each onboard will be a perfect experience. The service portal has a dedicated request type: “IT Onboarding New User”. A new hire triggers someone from HR to raise an IT ticket. IT onboarding involves three standard tasks:
With so many new hires, IT has mastered each one of these three standardized tasks. Using?Jira Automation, each “IT Onboarding New User” request triggered three subtasks. One for sourcing the laptop, a second for setting up the user account and app access, and a third for the welcome chat. This split makes increases efficiency and helps us to spot the progress on each of the three fronts.
领英推荐
Broadcasting a Jira report about the status of IT onboarding tickets
IT has met and exceeded all our targets related to these onboarding tickets. Still, they found that they were expanding a lot of time in providing status updates. HR could see that their issue is “In Progress” but they wanted more specific details. Hence, Jasmine was looking for a way to create more transparency into the actual progress. She needed a sustainable system that would not burden the team with more “paperwork”. She had also another goal in mind. She wanted to make their efforts visible and make their progress known. Not within the team, but toward the business at large. And no context was better than the new hires IT onboarding process. Her plan was simple, have a confluence blog page with a digest of current HR onboarding tickets. A simple Jira report with enough detail. She will refresh the blog twice a week, triggering a mail to all department heads and the HR team. The updated page would also appear in the Confluence news feed (under the “Discover what’s happening”). The next step was to install the?Jira Snapshots App?for Confluence. It took 15 minutes to set up a new Confluence page with the Jira Snapshot macro and retrieve the first data from Jira. Voila! She has a nice Jira report in Confluence, one that is visible to anyone with access to the page. No need for her colleagues to go into Jira territory (and no need to pay for their Jira license).
Momentum: Now that everyone is in the know and even more gets done
It turned out that installing the app had incredible returns. First, follow-ups from HR were reduced dramtically. These means less context switching and ticket bouncing. Both the IT team and the HR team became more productive. Second, the department heads were delighted to receive these regular updates. They liked the succinct structure of the report, and it was a quick reassurance that their new hire is in good hands. Third, the profile of the IT team has increased within the organization. Whether it was steering meetings, budget discussions, or strategy planning: C-levels wanted to hear from the IT team. Yes, Jasmine finally got approval to hire three new staff and also to launch her ambitious cloud data lake initiative. Soon, the first snapshot-based Jira report was replicated. Now they had smapshots of many of the IT and software development initiatives. Everyone knew when the system upgrade they’ve been waiting for is coming, or what will be in the scope of the next software release. Can some more transparency help your team get more done??Download Jira Snapshots from the Atlassian Marketplace?and see for yourself.