Looking for training "Cheat sheets"

[Jim Stewart]

Greetings. I'm working with a customer who is migrating over from Zendesk to Jira Service Desk. That process is already underway and I am joining mid-stream. Like all other projects of this nature, some training and hand-holding will be involved. One of the things we'll likely do is create "how-to" cheat sheets for them. But before we undertake that I thought I'd see if any such handy user guide either already exists inside Atlassian or if some enterprising user has created such a thing that we could use. Just thought I'd check on that before having to create new stuff. Thanks. 

[Matthew Stublefield · Accepted solution]

Hi Jim! I'm the head of education at Adaptavist, and before that I was a consultant and helped companies implement JSD among other things. I also taught at Summit and helped write the JSD certification exam.

Who is your audience for the cheat sheets? My experience with JSD training is:

• End-users think they need training before they see JSD, but the customer portal is so intuitive (or it should be, if you set it up right) that they don't even need a 1-pager cheat sheet. There's nothing to teach--the microcopy on the portal should be sufficient.
• Admins/Agents only need guidance if they're creating the projects, and once those projects are created, they're mostly done. You can get really deep with JSD, such that a single cheat sheet won't be sufficient, or you can use out-of-the-box settings and then a cheat sheet isn't needed as much. And for Agents, once the project is setup, again it's pretty intuitive and just 1-2 minutes of guidance (look at this queue; take the first item off the top; add a "comment to customer" to respond) is sufficient.

The only thing I could think that you might want to do is define a few terms, like SLAs and what they mean in JSD, and clarify what is and is not visible to the customers (internal vs. external comments, for instance).

Atlassian has one free training course for Jira Service Desk about using JQL in JSD. Again, this would only be applicable to the person or people building the projects. There's also a full JSD Admin course, but it sounds like you're looking for just a handout to give people, so that may not be applicable.

Adaptavist has a Jira Service Desk training course delivered through our Jira app, but it's server-only right now I'm afraid. We're beginning work on the cloud version right now and we do intend to launch a JSD training on it next year. The target audience for our training is admins and agents, and our three quick reference guides in the current version are:

• Project Settings
• Project Templates
• HTML/CSS Templates for Velocity Notifications

JSD is our most-used course after beginner-level training, but we also get feedback from a lot of people that it covers more features of JSD than they're going to use. A lot of people just want to set something up quickly, have the queues do some triaging, and keep track of interactions better through workflow automations and SLAs.

If you're going to create a 1-pager for agents, I think the main things to cover are:

• What is and is not visible to customers through the portal.
• How to handle attachments and share them with customers.
• Defined or best practices (which may be custom to the company you're working with... things like queue priority or canned responses).
• How to use Participants and Organizations.

That alone is probably a 1-pager. JSD can get advanced and complex, so a lot of the content will be determined by your audience and their requirements.

Hope that helps!

[Jim Stewart]

Thanks for comprehensive answer. The truth is I don't yet know what doc people do and don't need. Perhaps it's minimal. I'm meeting with some of the stakeholders today. Since posting this note I noticed that Atlassian has some user guides online. I may want to try using those or something like those, see what happens.