Well, it feels like only yesterday I was filling you in on all the exciting details of Atlassian’s future in the cloud and here I am, back already with more big news!
Atlassian has just announced the launch of Jira Service Management, and end-to-end IT Service Management (ITSM) built on the back of Jira, to help you enable your teams to respond quickly to challenges, handle incidents with ease and provide the best possible services to your colleagues and customers alike. So let’s have a look at what exactly is changing and how it can help you master ITSM.
So, What’s Happening?
First off it’s worth talking about exactly what is changing, and what you will need to do as a user in order to get the most out of the new offering. The most important takeaway is that Jira Service Desk is being reborn as Jira Service Management, keeping all the powerful functionality you know and love, and adding a bunch of new features designed to help you deliver top notch IT services and keep all your teams moving.
- Modern Incident Management: You may already be familiar with the powerful incident management tooling offered by Opsgenie, including on-call scheduling, alerting, incident swarming and more. Opsgenie has been helping teams manage incidents swiftly and effectively for years, and now all of that is coming to Jira! All cloud plans of Jira Service Management will include these Opsgenie features as well as even better integrations with Jira Software, Bitbucket and Confluence than ever before to help you unify your teams and work together to get on top of any pesky problems that pop up!
- Change Management, Built for the DevOps Era: Change is continuous in any effective organisation, and nowhere is that truer than the fast paced world of DevOps, but with change comes risk and in turn, the need for solid processes to manage your changes and protect you from unexpected consequences. Jira Service Management includes tools to help you make the best decisions for your organisation with advanced approval workflows and automated change risk assessments, as well as powerful integrations with CI/CD tools like Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins and CircleCI can help you maintain your momentum and see everything you need in one place, deploying changes directly from Jira and having visibility over audit trails for every change.
- Intuitive Service Experiences: Your agents are at the core of all your service management and Atlassian hasn’t forgotten them. They have redesigned the agent experience to help them stay on top of those queues better than ever with improvements to help categorise your service requests, incidents, problems and changes, and new features to help you bulk update tickets. In Jira Service Management, Atlassian even harnesses the power of machine learning to help you get on top of things by grouping similar tickets!
- Still to Come: And if all that wasn’t enough, there is even more on the way!
- Back in July, Atlassian aqcuired Mindville and with it their powerful asset management tool Insight, and we can expect to see this included within Jira Service Management soon.
- Not only that, but powerful conversational ticketing tool Halp is also on the way to help you turn Slack in to the service management hub of your dreams!
From Service Desk to Service Management across the enterprise…
The benefits of Jira Service Management, put simply, are to Deliver Value Fast, Make Work Visible, and Connect Dev and Ops.
What’s Next For You?
So what do you need to do as a customer to take advantage of all these powerful new features? Wait for it, because this is the best bit… nothing! For the majority of Jira Service Desk Cloud users, these changes will be automatically rolled out to you over the coming weeks at no extra cost so you can start your ITSM revolution with no fuss!
If you’re on the Atlassian Cloud and already using Opsgenie then you will be able to merge your instances to simplify your billing and share the features of both tools with all your licensed users. Alternatively, if certain Opsgenie features which are not yet supported by Jira Service Management (such as Heartbeat monitoring, incoming call routing and in-product live chat support) are important to you, than you can continue to manage the tools separately.
And for all the Server and Data Center customers out there, don’t worry, you’ve not been forgotten – Jira Service Management is coming to you too! These changes may take a little longer to reach you (Server is targeted by the end of 2020 and Data Center is coming soon) and unlike Cloud you won’t get Opsgenie capabilities out of the box (although you can of course still purchase it separately) but rest assured you won’t be left behind, and if you’re really keen to get started ASAP, well, maybe this could be just the push you need to start your move to the Atlassian Cloud!
Where Can you Find out More?
That’s a lot of new stuff to take in, and as ever it can be hard to know where to start. But fear not, whether you’re just starting out on your ITSM journey, or are seasoned veterans looking to squeeze every last drop of functionality from your tooling, AC are here to help. As an Atlassian Platinum Solutions Partner we have a wealth of experience working with Atlassian tools to deliver excellent ITSM services (and in fact we even recently hosted an event dedicated to Optimizing ITSM with Atlassian including a talk showing off how to make use of some of the new features back when they were in beta!) so why not drop us a line today? We’d love to help out!
