Best setup for ease of use and analytics?

[Brandon Eldridge]

I am in the process of planning a migration from Jira Software server to Jira Software in the cloud, and want to optimize my team's ticketing system during this transition.

We are not a development team, which seems to be what most of Jira is geared towards. We are a combination of a help desk / network engineer / systems administration / infrastructure projects and management. So, we're a little busy.

We need our ticketing system optimized because, at the moment, it's a bit of a cluster. When I built our current project I was learning as I went, and now I know (mostly) what I'm doing and need to streamline the new project.

Currently, we have our own project for ticketing our issues using a set of dropdown menus based on the issue type. We have two major issue types, Local and Remote, for local locations versus remote locations that we support. Based on the issue type selection during ticket creation, the available options on the dropdown menus will change accordingly.

The dropdown menus I'm referring to are a cascading select field. The left / first menu is the major option, with the right / second menu being the child option. This is working fine for our team, but makes pulling analytics difficult. It also makes it impossible to pull combination statistics from both issue types.

In the past, we have also used the typical component selection setup, but I feel like this could be streamlined somehow. As it stands, we have had issues with the component list just being too long. Ours ran something like this:

Local - Network Issue
Local - Power Issue
Local - Power Issue + Troubleshooting
Local - Server Issue
Remote - Network Issue
Remote - Power Issue

...  etc. The list becomes too long and unwieldy to make a ticket in a quick and accurate process. Components are far easier to pull statistics for though, in my opinion.

Any recommendations or ideas would be greatly appreciated, and thank you all in advance. If I can provide any more information, please let me know.

[Jack Brickey]

Have you considered Jira Service Desk instead of JSW? If you aren't doing development it is a better solution for helpdesk like activities IMO. If you have not tried it I highly recommend doing so as I think some of your questions will be answered. You could start with this guide.

[Brandon Eldridge]

I have looked into JSD but not extensively, mostly just a webinar and playing around in the trial environment. We're help desk-ish but also handle a lot of projects and engineering work. We're not really customer facing either, and the vast majority of our help desk type work stems from emails or phone calls, and then we manually make a ticket on our side. We're a large company, so adding names and users from 20+ other teams is also fairly unrealistic for us as well, unfortunately.

I really like the idea of JSD but I just don't have time before this cutover to make a thorough assessment, so it looks like we'll have to continue using JSW. Thank you for the suggestion, however!