How can I improve the handling as a customer in a Jira Service Management project?

[Luis Spechtenhauser]

Hi there,

I am currently facing following scenario:

We as a company are working with an IT-Service Provider (lets name it Company X) which is deliverying us various software packages throughout the year. Company X has Jira Service Management as its ticketing tool. In there are mostly reported Incidents and Request for Changes. Since the number of Tickets is very high (about 200 open tickets) and also the number of persons working on the tickets from our company is approx 8 people it is difficult to get an overview. The Jira Service Management is hosted by Copmany X and we only have the customer view on the tickets, since also other customers of Company X are working with this tool.

The question is now: Are there any options to improve the handling of the tickets from our side? Are there any products that could help us to be more flexible in handling the tickets and improve the collaboration through the companies?

I am very happy to hear about other experiences in handling a big amount of tickets from the customer view of Jira Service Management.

Cheers,

Luis

[Katarzyna Szumilas_Deviniti_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Luis Spechtenhauser

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

Even if you and your company's members have access only to Jira Service Management, it is possible to superchange it

[Luis Spechtenhauser]

Hi @Katarzyna Szumilas_Deviniti_ 

Thank you for your response. What do you mean by supercharge?

[Katarzyna Szumilas_Deviniti_]

Oh, I'm sorry. My response was cut off mid-sentence,

It's possible to give JSM users (without a Jira user/agent license) more possibilities to act on the Portal, but you will need an app for that.
The company I'm working for provides a few that let you:

1. Enhance Request list view (display more columns, filter requests based on given criterium, export them etc.)
2. Enable customers to edit their requests on the Customer Portal (the mentioned case when customer needs to change Assignee value).
3. Display additional details on the request view (like SLA, additional custom fields or related issues)
   

If you want to consult in details your use case you can always drop us an email or book a free demo session, and we will be happy to assist :)

Cheers,
Kasia

[Lisa Forstberg · Accepted solution]

Hi @Luis Spechtenhauser 

You and your team have the role customer in your service providers site. It means that you can only interact with your requests via the portal. It is limited and I can totally see that managing 200+ requests only with lists and basic filtering is tough for you.

The service provider own their site and you cannot add more features to it than they have bought / subscribed to. 

There are a few options that the service provider could do to improve the collaboration with you:

• the service provider can purchase apps to enhance the portal view to help you get a better overview
• you and the service provider can integrate your Jira sites using for example using the iHub app or the Exalate app to make issues sync bidirectional between sites
• the service provider could evaluate you having more internal access to the tickets. It would require giving your team licenses in their site and also configure the set up so you are not allowed to see other clients issues.

As you can tell, solutions to give you more features than you have today as a customer will incur a license cost and a configuration time cost for the service provider. 

all the best

Lisa

[Luis Spechtenhauser]

Hi @Lisa Forstberg

thank you very much for your answer and detailed information. Generally speaking, in your opinion Jira Service Management is a good tool for my use case?

I am speaking about two companies developing software together, one being the host of Jira Service Management and the other having only the customer role. Since in my opinion this tool can help a lot if the author of the ticket is the only one working on it from the customer perspective. But since during software development it might be necessary that the asignee from the customer perspective changes (developer --> tester). This tool might not offer enough options for that. So software developing with the role customer is not very much used. What do you think?

[Lisa Forstberg]

Generally if you develop software together I would probably have recommended to work together in a Jira software type project, instead of Jira Service Management. 

If there are a lot of back and forth during the lifecycle of the issue and your team is sometimes assigned to the ticket then handing it back to the partner and vice versa then this is not really possible in the Jira SM product. Jira SM is super good for operations processes but maybe not the best fit for development processes, that's why we have Jira ;-)  

But I totally see why this can happen. They are offering a way to report tickets and  they work with multiple partners and need to control the transparency. This might be a hairy question for them to deal with. Try to have a conversation about what you think would be the benefits for both them and you and your collaboration together.

As I said before it is possible to integrate multiple sites and achieve a bidirectional sync between issues in two sites, if you have a Jira site of your own if they don't want to let you into theirs.

good luck

Lisa