Atlassian Jira Service Management (JSM) has significantly evolved over the past few years, with more and more enterprise customers adopting JSM. One of its greatest strengths is also one of its biggest weaknesses: the service catalog. In JSM, there isn’t a true, centralized service catalog. Instead, there are service desk portals, requests, forms, issue types, workflows, and screens that can be utilized to offer services to customers. This structure provides enormous flexibility but also leads to considerable work during configuration.
It’s important to note that a company’s requirements often differ greatly from the technical implementation. Typically, a company wants to maintain and manage a service catalog. For example, a service might be server provisioning. It’s crucial to manage details such as which customer can order the service, what the costs are, who will perform the service, and so on. When attempting to implement this in Jira Service Management, it quickly becomes apparent that much of this cannot be maintained effectively, and certainly not at scale.
How Can an Enterprise Service Catalog Look in JSM?
First, let’s define some key terms:
- Business Service: This is the service that a customer wants to request from a service desk, such as provisioning an Atlassian Data Center instance.
- Service Workflow: These are the processes that the company or teams need to execute to deliver a Business Service, such as setting up a server or installing Jira.
A Business Service can consist of one or more Service Workflows. There may also be dependencies between Service Workflows.
SLAs can be attached to a Business Service or to the Service Workflows.
If you can work with this definition, you can implement an enterprise service catalog as Assets in Jira, providing a structured representation of this catalog within Jira.
How do I translate the Enterprise Service Catalog in Atlassian Terms?
In Atlassian terminology, a Business Service corresponds to the Request within a Portal. It’s what the customer can request from you. A Business Service may have the following attributes:
| Business Service | |
|---|---|
| Service Name | |
| Request Name | |
| Request Description | |
| Issue Type | |
| Workflow | |
| SLA Category | |
| Form | |
| Portal Group | |
| Service Workflow |
After a request is created in JSM you can assign the related Service Workflow as attributes to the Issue. Depending on your process structure you could either spin sub-task or linked task to execute the request.
The Service Workflow that supports a Business Service could include asset attributes such as:
| Service Workflow | |
|---|---|
| Name of Service | |
| Task Summary | |
| Task Description | |
| Task Dokumentation | |
| Issue Type | |
| Workflow | |
| Internal SLA Category | |
| Form | |
| Precessor | |
| Internal Costs | |
| Cost for Customer |
You can also create automations to deploy services based on your catalog via Jira Automation. Although this is a complex task, it allows you to maintain a large service workflow with a standardized structure, ensuring consistency and efficiency across your organization.