Jira Quick Start Guide

Manage your projects efficiently using the all-new Jira

Ravi Sagar

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789345889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Entreprise Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Leverage Jira's powerful task management and workflow features to better manage your business processes

Key Features

• The book covers all major applications of Jira, which are Jira Software, Jira Core, Jira Service Desk.
• Configure project workflows and the fields that will be used in the project with the help of Jira's features
• Create tickets for issues and manage your projects using the Jira software

Book Description

Jira is an issue tracker and project management system. With their latest release, the Jira team has now expanded their user base to agile teams as well as business teams. This book provides a comprehensive explanation covering all major components of Jira, including Jira Software, Jira Core, and Jira Service Desk.

This book starts with an introduction to Jira's unique features and how it can be used as an issue-tracking tool. It will then teach you about how a new project is created by a Jira administrator, what responsibilities there are, and using correct and relevant schemes in your project. You will then learn how to configure project workflows and fields for project screens.

You will understand the various permissions used in projects and the importance of project roles in Jira. Then, the book talks about the concepts of versions acting as milestones and using components when handling issues in your projects. It will then focus on analysing data using built-in reports and creating dashboards in Jira.

At the end, it will discuss various best practices for users as well as project managers or project administrators.

What you will learn

• Implement Jira as a project administrator or project manager
• Get familiar with various functionalities of Jira
• Configure projects and boards in your organisation's Jira instance
• Understand how and when to use components and versions in your projects
• Manage project configurations and Jira schemes
• Learn the best practices to manage your Jira instance

Who this book is for

This book will be especially useful for project managers but it's also intended for other Jira users, including developers, and any other industry besides software development, who would like to use Jira for project management.

Using Jira Service Desk for Help Desks

In this chapter, we'll discuss how to implement a help desk using Jira Service Desk to take care of IT help desk and support requests, which isn't just easy to use but also comes with pre-configured features of a ticketing system out of the box.

We'll first begin with various aspects of a typical help desk system, then we'll quickly create a Jira Service Desk project and go through its various features to understand how it can help us implement a great service desk.

Topics covered in this chapter include the following:

• Using Jira Service Desk for help desks
• Overview of help desks
• Creating a Jira Service Desk project
• Configure Jira Service Desk
• Jira Service Desk reports

Using Jira Service Desk for help desks

Jira Service Desk is the fastest growing Atlassian product because it makes it so easy for a help desk team to manage its work. So far in this book, we've been discussing various aspects of Jira. We've already covered Jira Core and Jira Software features by creating projects to understand how you and your team can use this intuitive tool to manage tasks and development activities. Jira Service Desk was built while keeping in mind customer satisfaction first and foremost, and making it very simple for any customer to raise and track their tickets in Jira Service Desk using a friendly customer portal; at the same time, technicians (also known as agents) work on those tickets using a familiar Jira interface.

Enabling Jira Service Desk

In Chapter 3, Using Jira Software for Development Teams, we learned how to enable new applications by going to the Manage Subscription section under Billing. Please do the same thing and enable Jira Service Desk on your cloud instance.

After enabling Jira Service Desk, you'll have 30 days to evaluate or learn it.

Overview of Helpdesk

So, now you're anxious to create a project in Jira Service Desk but it makes more sense to first go through the basics of a typical help desk system and understand its various aspects. These concepts will help you understand Jira Service Desk better.

Basic features of any help desk

Let's do a quick walk-through of various aspects and features of a typical help desk:

• Different user roles—customers and agents: In a help desk, there're primarily two types of users; one is your customer, who will raise a ticket on the system to get help from the service or support desk. The agent, on the other hand, will respond to the tickets and provide help to the customers.
• Service level agreement: Customers expect a quick resolution of their tickets. You can't expect them to wait indefinitely after raising a ticket. The service level agreement, also commonly known as SLA, defines how quickly agents will respond and resolve the ticket. Multiple SLAs can be defined and agreed with the customer or your client when providing services to them. SLAs are nothing but a time frame within which agents will do a certain action such as resolving tickets.
• Email notifications: Any help desk tool provides a platform for both customers and agents to interact with each other; however, sending email alerts to your customers will ensure that a ticket has been successfully raised and received by the support team. During the lifecycle of the ticket, on many occasions an email notification can be sent to involved parties; this is to ensure that the appropriate action is taken on time.

• Ability to engage with customers: The ticket, when raised by the customer, can be resolved directly by an agent or further information is needed by an agent to take further action on the ticket. Agents can also interact with the customer by posting comments on the ticket for customers and they can also reply by typing comments. It's a great way to have interaction between them.
• Reports: The service desk team manager wants to take a look at various analytics to understand how well his or her team is performing. There're many questions that manager will ask, such as: How many ticket did we resolve last month? How many times was the SLA breached? Are we overbooked? How many tickets are currently open? Answers to these questions can be found by looking at reports in a service desk tool.

Let's now look at common help desk processes.

Help desk processes

Help desks can be used to provide support to customers by handling their tickets. The tickets can be of different types and the way agents work on the tickets can be different based on the nature of the request. The way a ticket is handled is defined by the process behind it. Processes define how to handle different types of requests

The most common help desk processes are as follows:

• Incident management: Website is down is an incident
• Problem management: Website is down almost every week could be due to a problem
• Change management: Update the database version is a change
• Service request: Please reset my password is a service request

There're many other processes, such as release...