How Custom Charts for Jira is ending bad service management

There’s a new acronym in town: BSM.

It means “bad service management”. It was coined by Atlassian in a cheesy but concise attempt to highlight problems many organizations suffer from if they don’t have a decent service management system. Things like slow request fulfilment, confused service agents, bloated budgets, and angry customers. Of course, the real purpose is tell everyone that the cure to this horrible affliction is Jira Service Management (JSM).

Specifically, it is the high velocity in your service management processes that JSM helps you attain. So much of bad service management is to do with everything being too slow and inefficient. Organizing and prioritizing requests takes too long, which annoys service agents. Responding to and fulfilling requests takes too long, which annoys customers.

This is why, on November 1st-2nd, Atlassian held a major IT service management (ITSM) event called High Velocity in Sydney, with linked Atlassian Community Events (ACEs) taking place all over the world throughout the month. We were at a number of these events, promoting not just high velocity but higher velocity.

Let me explain what I mean.

How high velocity can put an end to BSM

Over 45,000 global customers, like Lufthansa, The Telegraph, Sony Music Publishing, and The Very Group, are either fully recovered from BSM or on the road to recovery thanks to JSM. JSM has decreased resolution time by 15% and saved IT ops teams 115 hours a month. How? By keeping things simple.

Many ITSM service desks are complex and overengineered, incorporating most if not all of the 26 processes described in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This is why everything happens so slowly. Jira Service Management incorporates only the four core ITIL processes: request fulfilment, incident management, problem management, and change management. Because that’s all most companies need and Atlassian knows it.

Moreover, JSM is an agile tool as well as an ITSM tool, with agile boards, cross-team collaboration capabilities, and features such as intelligent categorization of tickets and bulk ticket actions that enable teams to take action superfast. And agile is about continual improvement, too, which is why JSM comes with rich reporting capabilities.

Frankly, it’s kinda weird that powerful reporting is considered more important to agile than ITSM. Visualizing key ITSM metrics such as mean time to resolve, respond, repair and recover are absolutely essential for improving velocity in your service management processes. Perhaps this is where the old ITIL-driven service desks have been going wrong all along.

High velocity is good. Higher velocity is better.

We think that high velocity with JSM is a great way of treating bad service management. But it may not cure it, particularly if you’re a big company with complex data. To really stave off BSM, you have to achieve higher velocity. For that you have to look to the Atlassian Marketplace. The Marketplace exists to make Jira better, and by tapping into the apps available there, companies can increase velocity in their service management processes in ways that out-of-the-box JSM can’t.

Companies like Lufthansa, Sony, and Blaze are fully in tune with the need for powerful reporting and proper planning in their efforts to attain higher velocity. This is why they have moved beyond JSM’s native capabilities and implemented add-ons from the Marketplace like Structure and Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence.

Structure for Jira allows ITSM teams to build custom issue hierarchies for their service management requests and any related or dependent Jira tickets being worked on by other teams, such as the dev team. It’s the ultimate way of bringing of dev and ops together.

Custom Charts for Jira and its sister app, Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, enable ITSM teams to generate stronger and more tailored insights into their service management processes and spotlight areas for improvement. Although JSM’s out-of-the-box reports are powerful, limited customization can prevent managers from communicating the right insights in the most engaging way possible to drive change. Custom Charts, on the other hand, lets you build great-looking and highly relevant reports on Jira dashboards and Confluence pages. And you get full control over chart type, data choices, color, descriptions, labels, and more.

Custom Charts also integrates with tools like Structure, allowing you to make reports on the status and progress of your custom structures, something you can’t do with native JSM.

At ACE Amsterdam, our Atlassian experience architect, Andy (Fun Man) Barker, spoke to Dave Liao, an Atlassian consultant at Blaze, about how Marketplace add-ons are making a real difference for his company:

“When working with Jira Service Management, it is truly a gift to be able to apply these add-ons to the system and to be able to handle capacity planning and reporting at a level we never before experienced. It’s also amazing that, with Custom Jira Charts for Confluence, we can bring support and Structure data into both JSM and Confluence for reporting! The teams are diving into deep data analytics in the Jira side, whilst management have the high level in Confluence.”

The importance of ACEs in the “End BSM” initiative

Increasing velocity in your service management processes is about applying ITSM best practices. But many companies don’t know what those practices are. This is why Atlassian Community Events have become an important tool in the fight against bad service management.

At ACE Wiesbaden, Andy met up with the Lufthansa team and their resident Atlassian tools product manager, Lars Lipecki. Lars saw the extremely high value of both the events and the tools:

“Being able to quickly implement best practice ITSM through JSM is our bestseller inside the Lufthansa Group, and coming to these events really helps drive our own knowledge for those best practices.“

Chris Cooke, business unit manager for Custom Charts for Jira and Confluence at Tempo, also saw the value of ACEs in ending the scourge of bad service management:

“With the full support of Atlassian, and a clear focus on ITSM, there’s been a clear vision for the community to get behind and gather around. I could jump on a last minute flight to Delhi, confident I’d be going to a well-organised, well-attended event to learn something and connect with subject matter experts in the ecosystem asking all the most interesting questions. A real mixture of Atlassians, solution partners, vendors, system admins, veterans, and those just starting their journey and trying to learn how Atlassian can help them get out of email chain hell.”

Andy has been traveling across Europe talking to different JSM users in cities like Hamburg, Madrid, and Cardiff. Users from industries as diverse as augmented reality for electric vehicle charging solutions and HR portals for ecommerce platforms. All of those users have come away recognizing that the answer to ending BSM is attaining higher velocity, and the answer to attaining higher velocity is JSM reporting with Custom Charts. Specifically, creating custom visuals of data from JSM, Structure, Timesheets for Jira, and other Custom Charts-integrated apps on Jira dashboards and Confluence pages.

Andy says:

“I’ve seen BSM take over and kill a company. And I’ve also seen Custom Charts be the magic cure that’s saved companies from it.”

If your ITSM team wants to put an end to bad service management by achieving a higher velocity, download Custom Charts for Jira and Custom Jira Charts for Confluence free for a month, and watch them work their magic.