Enhance your service delivery by integrating Jira Software and Jira Service Management
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Enhance your service delivery by integrating Jira Software and Jira Service Management
Rich Blunt
16 February 2024
9 min read
Rich Blunt
16 February 2024
9 min read
The problem of organisational silos crippling team collaboration and efficiency is not a new one; however, today it has gained fresh urgency. Fast-paced IT and software environments demand enhanced communication and visibility across functions in order to quickly deliver (and iterate) solutions that meet changing business demands. This is hard, if not virtually impossible, to achieve in heavily siloed organisations due to compromised efficiency and data integrity across the software development and service delivery value streams.
One way to deal with silos is to adopt a robust and flexible platform ecosystem, which can unify and streamline activities across IT – from start to finish. The integration of Jira Service Management (JSM) and Jira Software addresses that need perfectly.
While both Jira Software and Jira Service Management offer distinctly different features that target specific teams in an organisation, they are built on Atlassian’s same Jira platform. When integrated, they provide a centralised platform for modern agile teams to coordinate efforts, share information, and speed up the flow of work so they can respond to changing business demands, with greater speed and efficiency.
Discover the difference between Jira Software and Jira Service Management
You may already know, but it might be worth refreshing your memory before reading further.
Why Jira Service Management and Jira Software are a powerful combination
1. Seamless visibility from start to finish, with a single source of truth
The connectivity between Jira Service Management and Jira Software offers capabilities for unparalleled visibility from the ground up.
Teams across development and IT operations have a centralised view of all issues for quick and painless collaboration. This prevents context switching since teams no longer need to keep track of multiple systems to hunt down details about their projects or changes. They are able to quickly find what they need, whether it’s an overview of a project or a list of impending service tickets.
2. High-velocity service delivery
For those development teams that already use Jira Software, Jira Service Management provides an easy way to track impending service requests so they can develop and deploy fixes promptly.
Through the utilisation of automation between Jira Service Management and Jira Software, ops teams can easily route incidents to the right development team so they can immediately take action. This in turn improves responsiveness and speeds up resolution.
3. Faster development activities
With its built-in capabilities for automated change risk assessments and advanced approval workflows, Jira Service Management can accelerate workflows for dev teams and empower everyone to navigate changes smoothly – without going through the time-consuming bureaucratic procedures traditionally associated with change management.
Additionally, through integration with CI/CD tools, such as Bitbucket, JSM provides increased visibility to track deployments and ensures nothing slips through the cracks.
4. Security
Having all your team under one “roof” will assists with internal security but also help with dealing with incoming security issues affecting the business by utilising the Atlassian tools to “swarm” on issues efficiently in one place rather than going round different systems to find the information you need. You can also have tools reporting into JSM that if they meet a criterial automation can act as a call to action, put tickets in non JSM teams projects to aid visibility of an issue.
Practical Jira Service Management and Jira Software integration use cases
So, what would dev teams already relying on Jira Software use Jira Service Management for? We’ve identified the most common use cases for integrating Jira Service Management with Software in order to plan, build, and deliver software at scale.
1. Adding the portal capability to streamline the intake of work from customers that dev teams support
With this integration, developers no longer need to log in to multiple tools and channels to do their work. All the information they need is right there in Jira Service Management’s self-service portal, right from feature requests, bugs, incidents to any other customer requests. Plus, all requests (whether logged through the self-service portal, email, embeddable widget, chat, or AP) can be streamlined into triaging tickets for the dev team on a Jira board. This means dev can spend more of their time doing the work that creates value for the business, and less on time-intensive work needed to keep tools and colleagues in sync.
2. Knowledge management
With a built-in knowledge base included with Jira Service Management, customers can easily access self-help articles that provide instant answers for some of the most common questions received by teams. This allows customers to self-serve instead of raising requests like bug reports and feature requests for the development team. Support agents can create, curate, and audit these articles, directly within their Jira Service Management project.
3. Sharing and linking records between dev and ops teams
Integrating dev and ops teams on a shared platform allows them to easily share data between projects and speed up the flow of work across the organisation. Service teams can seamlessly link tickets in Jira Service Management to issues in Jira Software, enabling dev teams to quickly identify development requests and prioritise work. With the help of automation, teams can create, link, and even comment on issues across Jira Service Management and Jira Software projects.
4. Major incident management
The integration of Jira Service Management and Jira Software provides an easy way for dev teams to prioritise work and resolve impending requests based on severity levels. With the help of automation, critical issues can be swiftly routed to the appropriate development teams based on predefined criteria, thereby reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Additionally, features like incident conference calls, chat channels, and the incident investigation view make sure the right teams are equipped with all the information they need to promptly resolve and fix issues.
5. Enabling a more efficient change practice using automated change management workflows
While it’s critical for dev teams to instantly sync up with ops on the status of changes, it can take up a great deal of time.
Jira Service Management offers robust change management features to automate the processing and prioritisation of change requests, as well as assess the risks and impact of each change. This in turn can lighten the load for dev teams, who no longer need to manually update ops on the status of each iteration – a process which is not just time-consuming but also error-prone.
Furthermore, seamless integrations between Jira Service Management and CI/CD tools like Bitbucket allow teams to take advantage of features like deployment gating and tracking, promoting enhanced traceability into changes. This allows any code deployment to automatically trigger a change record in Jira Service Management, thereby enabling a more transparent and efficient change management process.
6. Asset and configuration management
Jira Service Management provides a flexible and dynamic way to track details related to all kinds of assets and Configuration Items (CIs) that exist in an organisation’s complex technology environment. By doing so, it helps teams gain full visibility into how applications, services, and the underlying infrastructure interact with each other and how they impact the work that teams do.
Real-time data on users, hardware, software, networks, contracts, and other assets empowers teams with critical information to make the right decisions at the right time (for instance, to plan and authorise change, resolve incidents and problems faster, or proactively troubleshoot potential problems). It also enables seamless communication, greater transparency, and reduced friction between dev and ops teams, as they can see everything that relates to service in your organisation in one place.
Next step
What sets Jira Software and Jira Service Management apart from other tools is their shared foundation, which allows for seamless and straightforward integration between the two platforms. Together, they can provide a synergistic environment for modern IT, dev and ops teams that improves their visibility over work, assists collaboration and automation, and unlocks greater productivity.
If you want to explore integrating Jira Service Management and Jira Software for your business, get in touch with our experts today.
Written by
Rich Blunt
Technical Consultant
ITSM