Interview with an Expert: How Dhruvil Shah Replaced Email Chaos with Scalable Support at Sophos

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From Remedyforce to Jira Service Management: A tale of automation, documentation, and smarter portals

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From Email Swamps to Systemic Flow

Dhruvil Shah is the Senior Cloud Solution Engineer at Sophos, a UK-based cybersecurity company. He manages the Atlassian ecosystem—Jira Software, Jira Service Management (JSM), and Confluence—for internal teams across departments like HR, Facilities, Legal, and Procurement. His role combines strategic consulting with his stakeholders and end-to-end delivery.

He’s also an Atlassian Community Champion as one of the leaders of the Ahmedabad Atlassian Community Events (ACE) chapter.

Despite his title, Dhruvil isn’t just an admin—he's a system architect. Before JSM, his teams relied on BMC Remedyforce and fragmented tools. Support requests came through emails and spreadsheets, with no standardization, reporting, or visibility.

“We had workload and task-tracking issues across geographically distributed teams. Doing all this through emails or spreadsheets was a genuine pain,” he said.

Creating Proven Paths with JSM and Confluence

Sophos supports users across the US, Canada, UK, India, Germany, the Philippines, and Australia. To bring consistency and clarity to support, Dhruvil pitched an integrated solution: JSM powered by Confluence and automation.

Here’s what he built:

• Customer Portal: A centralized intake for requests, improving clarity and reducing back-and-forth.
  
  
• Knowledge Base: Linked Confluence articles help users self-serve, reducing ticket volume and encouraging agents to maintain updated documentation.
  
  
• Automation Rules: Custom automations route tickets, assign them based on region or function, and notify the right stakeholders.
  
  

“Adding Confluence knowledge bases deflects tickets and reduces agent fatigue. This pushes the agent teams to keep their process docs up to date,” Dhruvil explained.

A Closer Look at the Workflow

The solution wasn’t about features—it was about flow:

• The Portal uses labeled request types aligned with each internal service team.
  
  
• Knowledge Base articles surface as users begin typing their requests.
  
  
• Automation rules assign tickets using location-based logic, custom fields, and escalation triggers.
  
  

“It’s not just automation—it’s orchestration,” Dhruvil emphasized.

Measurable Impact

Sophos saw immediate gains:

• Fewer tickets: Confluence deflection helped users answer their own questions.
  
  
• Faster triage: Tickets reached the right team from the start.
  
  
• Better reporting: Structured queues made it easy to surface trends and measure team performance.

Dhruvil created a connected system to reduce MTTR (mean time to resolution) while improving Sophos internal customer CSAT (customer satisfaction).

Advice to Other Teams

Dhruvil’s experience offers takeaways for other IT leaders:

1. Use Confluence for knowledge sharing
   
   
2. Customize your service portal
   
   
3. Automate with intention
   
   
4. Drive ownership through visibility
   
   
5. Grow your ecosystem, not just your toolset
   
   

In his final comments, Dhruvil emphasized that being part of the Atlassian Community helped shape his strategy. As mentioned earlier, he's a Community Leader in Ahmedabad, India, himself. The networking he’s been able to do via Atlassian Community Events (ACE) helped him formulate his strategies and refine his ideas.

Final Thoughts

Dhruvil Shah turned a disjointed, email-heavy workflow into a streamlined, self-sustaining support model. By combining Jira Service Management, Confluence, and automation, he helped Sophos scale its internal services while giving users and agents a better experience.

“I built a foundation that others can replicate—not just replicate, but expand.” 

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If you have a Jira Service Management journey you'd like to share, reach out to me. I'd love to interview you!

Dave Rosenlund is an Atlassian Community Champion and the instigator behind the virtual Atlassian Community Events chapter, ITSM/ESM Masters. He’s also a founding leader of the Program/Project Masters chapter. In his day job, he works for Platinum Atlassian Solution Partner, Trundl.