Whether you view your organisation as having an agile approach or not, in 2020, companies had no choice but to drastically change their way of working as the world rapidly pivoted to remote working. Organisations that had already embraced agile principles had the advantage of being able to adapt faster to the pandemic and meet the demands of their employees, who were suddenly all working from home. Now, as we start to slowly emerge from multiple lockdowns and restrictions, one interesting side effect of COVID-19 is that it has lowered our collective tolerance for slow, overly bureaucratic processes. We all crave an agile approach, whatever our definition of agile might be.
COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation
Digital innovation has fundamentally changed how the world operates. COVID-19 demonstrated just how much we rely on technology. And, as modern technology permeates every area of our lives, our expectations around the availability of information and the speed with which we can obtain it are even higher than they were pre-pandemic. Therefore, as lockdowns ease, the world is continuing to change just as rapidly to keep pace with the demands on businesses, who must accelerate out of recession and aggressively compete to remain relevant.
The knock-on impact of this acceleration is that organisations need IT teams working together as efficiently and effectively as possible. Likewise, IT service management (ITSM) capabilities must be nimble and efficient to support shifting organisational priorities. Able to capitalise on new opportunities and satisfy growing end-user demands for immediate and seamless service, wherever users are located.
To meet this increasing demand for speed, the flow of work between support, DevOps and operational teams must be unified. Furthermore, the teams need to be empowered to deliver work with agility. IT teams are under huge pressure and are required to become even more adaptable to the challenges they face. This means that practices and workflows need to remain flexible. So that teams are better positioned, should businesses experience the year 2020 again, in the future.
Traditional service management approaches can’t keep pace with demand
However, even the smallest request for change is not an easy task for some organisations. Tickets must be approved by layers of bureaucracy, which can take weeks or sometimes months. Additionally, increased demand, combined with the ongoing pressure to lower costs, runs counter to traditional approaches to service management. This approach emphasises risk mitigation and control over efficiency and agility. It can leave some IT teams hamstrung and unable to play to their full potential. In our ‘always on’, digital world, this will disadvantage those companies unable to respond. As a result, end-users and customers are no longer willing to accept long wait times. And why should they? The COVID-19 experience showed many businesses can completely change their way of working overnight. Therefore, many customers are now less forgiving of businesses that cannot accommodate their requirements or promptly meet their expectations.
Organisations can accelerate service management initiatives and introduce more efficient methods to serve ever-growing business demands by implementing Jira Service Management. This is the only ITSM solution built on the Jira software development platform. Users don’t have to seek the Jira application separately, and they benefit from having everything they need in one platform.
DevOps, IT support, and IT operations must all collaborate
This accessibility is important because IT teams using other service management tools often end up integrating their application with Jira for additional functionality. This can be clunky and not as streamlined. The co-existence of Jira Service Management and the Jira software development platform has huge benefits. It means support and development teams can collaborate on the same platform and fix software issues and incidents faster. Jira Service Management was designed with IT and development teams in mind and provides streamlined requests and change management processes. This allows teams to make change requests without complex approvals and link incidents to problems in one click.
With other service management platforms, siloed tools between development and IT operations can result in context switching, lack of visibility, and decelerated work. As a result, integrations between Jira Software and service management tools tend to be weaker and cumbersome to manage. In contrast, tight integrations between Jira Software and Jira Service Management mean seamless and accelerated workflows between development and IT. Teams can link issues across Jira and ingest data from other software development tools. This provides IT support and operations teams with richer contextual information to respond rapidly to requests, incidents and changes.
Jira Service Management also offers customisable templates for ITSM, customer service, and business teams such as HR and finance. Furthermore, an intuitive portal in Jira Service Management makes it effortless for customers to ask for help. Simple UI makes it easy for teams to use. With easily configured automations, IT teams can prioritise and resolve requests quickly.
Service management built for the DevOps era
In today’s world of digitised services and support, being able to deliver a rich and collaborative service desk, modern incident management, and change management is critically important. The world is changing fast. To keep pace, organisations need a service management platform built for the DevOps era. An open, collaborative platform enables teams to scale operations quickly and ensure the organisations’ critical services are always on and operating at high velocity. This will ensure they can respond quickly to business change while delivering great customer and employee service experiences.
As an Enterprise-Certified Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, Clearvision is well placed to provide large enterprises and the public sector with consultancy, technical implementation, hosting, training, licensing and support services for the Atlassian stack, as well as vetted contractors via its sister company, ClearHub. Clearvision has also established partnerships with a number of leading technology vendors that bring added value to its customer base, namely AWS, Checkmarx and Mendix, amongst others.
