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At Isos Technology, one common trend we're seeing is organizations that have scaled beyond the ability to use their manual processes. If you're noticing that this is happening in your company, read on! We'll take a look at how Jira Service Management can provide a viable solution for your team by automating processes.
Many organizations manage their services in different formats, including emails, phone calls, and spreadsheets. Sometimes the processes become too large or unwieldy, things fall through the cracks, and then the whole system falls apart. It doesn't take much for problems to arise--any process that has a manual component to it ends up being fragile. That's one of the big problems that we see when we delve into what's limiting scalability for our clients. Companies want to grow, yet they've boxed themselves in with walls of inefficiency and cumbersome processes.
Automating Your Processes to Ensure Teams Get the Tickets They Need
What we often find is the team that's servicing requests isn't always the one that can do everything. And in an onboarding or an off-boarding situation, there's usually a hardware component. These requests sometimes have to go to other teams to finish or to continue the process.
In those cases, you can use automation to help spin off some of the ancillary or sub-tasks that have to happen in order for that request to be complete.
Automation helps with that round trip. It does this by making sure everything and everybody gets the piece of the ticket that they need.
How JSM Makes Automating Your Processes Simple
There is a pretty strong set of built-in automation features inside of Jira Service Management, including some that existed before Atlassian acquired Automation for Jira Service Desk. That acuisition simply added even stronger automation features, and you can take advantage of them to streamline any manual processes that you still have out there.
Let's look at the project or request intake process, for example, since it's the point where tickets get created. At the point of intake, there is a host of things that can trigger automations, actions you can take, and conditions that control flow.
Jira Service Management allows you to take whatever you're able to codify from the intake process—things like request type, routing patterns, and approvals—and automate them. You can even do things outside of the general scope of a workflow. For example, when a specific condition is triggered, you can automate what has to happen next.
Leveraging Automation
Here's a simple way to put the repeatable processes in the system:
- Send an email
- Create an issue
- Update custom field values
- Generate a host of linked issues required to complete the request
Leveraging automation allows you to build the process you want people to follow right into the system. That way, everybody follows the same process and things happen in a predictable, repeatable manner. Predictability is very important—you want to know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen!
There are almost infinite capabilities within Jira Service Management, using either built-in automation or third-party Marketplace apps. Once you start automating your processes, you'll soon realize just how many things you can make JSM do.
Automating Non-Technical Processes (An HR Example)
We've already touched on how important it is to standardize processes so you can of predict what will happen next. One non-technical use case for this type of standardization is within Human Resources (HR). At Isos Technology, we've seen a lot of this, and even done some interesting automation around our own HR processes. We've found that it's really valuable because HR requests can have a good deal of complexity to them.
When an employee is onboarded, there's a whole list of things that have to happen. Accounts need to be set up in various software applications and apps, and hardware has to be assigned. If a new employee's passwords aren't granted, or if they don't get the hardware they need, they can't get to work and start adding value to the company.
There's also a separate set of processes whenever somebody is off-boarded, and if these don't get done in a timely manner, it could be a security risk (we'll look at that next).
Automating your Processes Makes Off-Boarding Easier
Employee off-boarding is another great example that we show clients when we're figuring out where automation might fit in for them. You can have tickets for IT to automatically remove system access, for facilities to remove whatever needs to go from their desk, and for HR to processes all the related paperwork. It provides a framework and can make sure that those processes are followed.
The system ensures that all of those items are complete without somebody going into the system, finding a physical checklist, emailing all the appropriate parties with their tasks, and following up to make sure everything was done. Instead, you just trigger the appropriate workflow and let the system generate and assign all the tasks. This also makes it easy to check on the status of the ticket and close it when all the tasks are complete.
Automate to Control Assets
Those are the strengths of automating your processes. It builds in standardization. Not only do you know that the process is going to flow in the way that you want it to, you also have traceability back into each stage of the process.
Another one of our favorite things to automate is asset management. IT teams can watch their equipment and make sure it's serviced at the right time.
Automating asset management processes helps keep equipment maintained. You might have servers or PCs out there in the wild with your teams. You need to know:
- Are they up to date?
- Are they at the end of their lifecycle?
- What hardware needs replacing?
- When do servers need maintenance?
- Do they need patching?
Patching is a great example. If you have a patch scheduled, you want automation to create tickets for you on a regular basis. Automation can be powerful in controlling the assets of your organization.
