Recommendations Integrate Service Desk with Software Development Projects

[EK Zam]

Hello everyone, 

My team currently has a JIRA Software Development project (under JIRA SERVER) we use to manage our backlog and current sprint progress. In this project we utilize 1) the Kanban board, 2) a BI tool extension to provide reporting, and 3) the work log function to track hours spent on each task, 4) in addition to other out of the box features.

We have a small base of external customers who ping individual team members, who then add a ticket to the software development project as a "service request", manually copying and pasting. As our customer base grows, we are looking to add a Service Desk, but we're not sure how to best integrate the two.

We're looking to make this easy on the team, but also want a good way of tracking time/logging work so we can report on it using our BI tool. From my research the options sounds like:

1. Cloning or duplicating a ticket using the linking feature, This means two tickets are being maintained, right?

2. Using the board and BI tool queries to query both projects (service desk and software dev). This would mean the team would need to track their time in two places.

What best practices approaches (process and tool specific) do you teams use to manage customer requests, while being able to log work and report on the work hours?

[Syed Majid Hassan -Exalate-]

Hi @EK Zam

My name is Syed and I am a pre-sales Engineer @ Exalate. 

The use case you described is exactly what our tool solves by creating a fully bi-directional sync between the Jira Server and Jira Service Desk. The workflow would be as follows:

1. You have a ticket on the Jira Server and people are working on it. 
2. When you need to create a replica of this ticket on the Service Desk, you can click a button to do that. This process can also be fully automated via triggers. 
3. Once the replica is created in Service Desk, both these tickets will be linked and would sync comments, attachments, status, priority and user defined fields both way. This part can be fully customized in Exalate and you can add the time tracking information in a manner which best fits your business needs. 

Please feel free to review Exalate to see if it fits your needs or simply book a demo with us to explore your use case further.

Thanks

Syed

[Diana_Architect_ZigiWave]

Hi @EK Zam 

My name is Diana and I am a solutions architect at ZigiWave. You can easily make the integration you're asking about. Our no-code integration platform ZigOps will help you achieve that in a matter of minutes. It allows the transfer of default fields (incident, task, bug, story, tickets) + custom fields between the systems and syncs them in real-time. Our tools reads the schema dynamically and can transfer any fields. Everything happens automatically, so you do not need to waste your time. Also, it's fully customizable and can be tailored to fit your needs.

If you want to see how it works in action: book a technical demo. 

[Matthias Gaiser _K15t_]

Hi @EK Zam

welcome to the Atlassian Community.

As you've pointed out, you basically have two options:

1. Two (linked) issues for each JSM Request. You can then use Automation or an Issue Sync solution in order to keep these issues in sync.
2. One issue for each JSM Request with a unified board between Jira Software and JSM.

I would base my decision on how separate the two projects and their issues should be handled.

• If your goal is to have two teams in the end, one is handling the JSM requests and occasionally needs to involve the other team using Jira Software, I'd prefer option 1.
• If you have one team who needs to handle both topics and needs to coordinate the workload based on the unified view of the current open Jira Software and JSM issues, I'd go for option 2.

Logging work on both projects or only one shouldn't make a big difference from my point of view. It might actually be easier with the unified board option so that not efforts for the same topic are logged partly on the Jira Software and partly on the JSM issue.

So in my limited understanding of your use case, I'd recommend option 2.

Cheers,
Matthias.

PS: I'm part of the team behind Backbone Issue Sync, an issue sync app which you could use for option 1.

[Patrick Haley]

Hey EK, we've gone through this and there are a few ways to handle it. 

1. As you mentioned, when a JSM issue is raised you can use automation to create a new issue on the Jira board and link them together. This works pretty well and you can even use another automation to resolve the JSM issue if the linked Jira issue is resolved. However, it has a few drawbacks such as the people updating Jira would need to comment on both issues if you want to update the customer. This may not be an issue though if the dev team using Jira doesn't actually interface with the customer like your support team using JSM. Another challenge with this is if someone raises a bug on JSM, but if it's a low priority for your dev team in Jira then it may sit as an unresolved issue in JSM which could impact some of your issue statistics. 

2. Another option is to create a custom board view in Jira that can display issues from both Jira and any desired JSM projects. This means Jira users can transition issues using the normal Kanban board, but they'd require access to JSM and Jira. This comes with some other considerations such as making sure they're using internal comments appropriately if customers should not see developer communications or possibly configuring a security schema to handle this automatically. Keep in mind though that this option doesn't solve the problem of low priority issues remaining open in JSM. 

I hope this helps.