Jira Setup And Slack Integration

I've been tasked with setting up an entire Jira instance at work and I love it already. That includes Jira Service Desk to allow internal employees and clients to raise tickets, Jira Software for the IT department to build and release software, and Confluence as a space to document all company related matters and help articles. It's definitely a beast to setup in the back-end but nothing a few hours of Googling can't solve.

I've spent a lot of time learning how to use Jira Service Desk and setting it up ready for internal use before making it client facing. I think I've cracked it and through discussions with the customer services team, have created a ticket service desk page with appropriate issues and resolutions. It always helps to put nice thumbnails on the request types.

I showed the CS team a quick overview of the platform and what it's capable of. It will be a bit of a change compared to Pivotal Tracker but I think we can make it work. Because of the licensing structure with Jira, we can only have 3 licenses for the Service Desk platform to stay within the $10 a month range. 4 licenses would shoot it up to $80 a month. To work around this, I've used 1 license for the customer services team an 1 for me as the IT admin. All the individuals within Customer Services have been added the same way you add external customers and you can have as many of these as you like. For people labelled as customers, they get a simplified portal to raise and track issues.

You can see how nicely it integrates with Confluence by showing relevant articles and help pages when raising a ticket. The more information you add to confluence, the more useful this feature will be.

The Customer Services user has a much more detailed overview when raising tickets.

Once this was all setup, I created a workflow for the tickets and made the buttons appear on the overview so we could transition the work from different states such as in progress to ready to test. When you transition a ticket from one stage to the next, it will bring up a comment box, allowing you to add any more details. Check out the workflow I designed, below. The boxes are the states the ticket can be in with the lines representing the transitions between states.

Now it's time to expand the workflow! I created a Jira Software project specifically for IT called IT Work. Any tickets raised by CS will then be copied over to our IT project with all the details, ready for us to work on before sending it back to CS. The idea behind having a separate project for the IT department is so we can track our work using things like kanban boards and sprints. We can also write any technical information that's useful for us but might be irrelevant for anyone else to see.

The final part of the puzzle was integrating Jira with Slack. I made a new channel called jirabot-channel where all Jira notifications linked to the Customer Service Tickets project will end up. The following notifications will show up in this channel:

• Issue created
• Assignee updated
• Someone leaves a comment
• Issue transitioned

I've also added the Jira bot to our customer services channel but turned off all notifications. This means that if you share a Jira issue link to to the channel, it'll show a nice preview of the issue with all the relevant information such as the ticket details and status.

And that's it! I hope this helps you with setting up your own Jira instance. Feel free to get in touch with me on LinkedIn or email me personally at [email protected]