Jira is great and it makes sense to start using it to handle incoming requests.
I’ve been looking at Jira Service Desk. I like it.
Some features I’ve seen that would be really useful that we don’t get in Jira by default, or bugzilla:
1. SLA
So, SLA allows us to set automatic deadlines for each type of request. For example, a new Google Apps account should be setup in 12 hours. A security fault should be resolved in 2 hours. These SLAs allow us to objectively (with discrete subjectivity) prioritise work.
2. Waiting for customer
Just a small thing that helps really. We can configure the time taken for us to resolve a request to not include time it takes a community to answer needed questions, which can really help us take better metrics
3. Automation
This is the show stopping bit of Service Desk. We can configure automation to notify of us of certain types of requests based on SLA, priority. But more importantly, it can automatically triage. So for example, we can select one option on a task, and jira will then triage the task according to the policy for the specific details of that task.
4. Customer Portal
The customer portal is pretty. It’s well organised and we can use it to help communities file requests with the right info, and then use that info for automatic triage and SLA assigning.
5. Doesn’t put community on the internal side
Communities don’t really need to know every detail of a request, and doing that can actually just confuse things. Jira allows us to handle the moving parts of a request using internal comments, which means that we remain open in that people can still access them from “actual jira” but we keep things simple in the request thread that the community sees.
Other than these things, there’s just lots of little things that come with jira, for example, Agile. Agile helps us. Bugzilla sucks at processing requests because you can’t see the state of the request. Issue types, queues, custom screens, tabs etc can all just make it a nicer experience.
I should mention, we can get a license for this if we ask nicely. I just need to know that there aren’t any clear concerns for trying this.
I’d like to try it.