What Should You Do Next After Reaching the Destination?

Creating the Post-Migration Plan: Five Critical Steps for Successful Jira Service Management Start

Fortunately, the hardest part of the work is already done. You could migrate the company’s data to the chosen service desk solution. But at the same time, you have not finished a relevant migration project with the Jira Service Management import. There is a need to perform some things to ensure the system’s correctness and readiness for work. So, your checklist must include the following tasks:

1. Check if all information migrated correctly.
2. Announce to all involved that the Jira Service Management import is finished.
3. Verify all the updates related to the case of the knowledge base migration.
4. Set up an efficient workflow.
5. Integrate apps required by your organization before migrating data.

#1. Verify the Migration Outcomes

Although importing data needs appropriate eye monitoring, different errors still occur. The major causes involve network disturbances, database definition, or even format mismatches. Of course, the information in your destination service desk tool migrated from your old solution. Thus, if it has poor value, you failed to provide an effective data audit. Or you ignored some important steps during the pre-migration stage. It means you need to check your migration outcomes before starting to use Jira Service Management.

However, resolving such pain points may become a challenging task. Below, we have created a list of test cases that help your company make the “checking pain” process easier:

• You might have applied Jira Service Management bulk import. Here, you should check whether the number of records in the CSV files refers to the information in Jira. In the case of API-based migration, you must check the migrated records using your old and new service desk platforms. 
• Confirm that you have removed all duplicates in Jira Service Management. Also, ensure that information did not duplicate itself during the migration process. After all, any data redundancy is unacceptable. 
• Ensure that Jira Service Management preserves the information values, types, and format. 
• Check your information to find possible modification, loss, or corruption after importing. 
• Ensure that your support team can perform tasks and utilize functions offered by the tool’s restrictions they obtain.

Your company should not underestimate the detailed checking. Since you have spent significant financial investments and time, you need to check the CSV import and API-based migration thoroughly. 

#2. Welcome Your Organization to Jira Service Management

Your mission appears completed. The company has imported its corporate data to Jira Service Management and tested relevant results. Now, you can report to your executives, boss, stakeholders, and clients on “the successful finish of the migration project.”

Establish a Support Channel

Redirecting your support service channels to the new service desk during import is among the most efficient data migration practices. These channels may include email, chat, social media, etc. After completing the migration, you need to check whether all channels are redirected to Jira Service Management correctly.

Manage Tickets That Appear During the Migration

Let’s suppose you have migrated tickets to Jira Service Management. But your old help desk tool continued working and receiving clients’ requests during the migration process. Thus, you have to collect such tickets and import them to Jira Service Management. 

Another example is when you purchased a third-party service and obtained your information migrated within a defined time frame. Here, you could plan the performance of your old system using the following two approaches: 

• Keep the previous service desk tool downtime for several hours and wait for the end of migration. 
• Continue working and inform your support team about the import. That helps avoid changing or updating records during the process.

From a theoretical viewpoint, these approaches can prevent new tickets from entering your old help desk software. But in practice, you should better check the number of tickets on both old and new service desk platforms. That allows your company to ensure that no information has been leaked or lost.

Demonstrate How the New Platform Works

When planning your migration project, you should create the appropriate documentation to smooth the implementation of your new service desk. Probably, only your support team analyzed thoroughly a new working environment. So, you have to enhance the understanding of Jira Service Management for other departments, including marketing, sales, and development. For instance, arranging a demo and tuning the two-way communication are quite efficient practices. They allow your organization to define the outcomes it will achieve thanks to using a particular service desk tool. 

#3. How to Set Up Your Knowledge Base

Jira Service Management Help Center helps your company manage self-service branding options and knowledge base. Below, we have briefly described the three steps you need to take to make your knowledge base live:

• Enabling Help Center using a setup mode.
• Getting Help Center ready for release. 
• Activating a self-service. 

Step 1

Firstly, you must have administrator rights for enabling your Help Center. You can link your Jira Service Management account and Confluence account to create an excellent knowledge base. That allows your organization to reject common requests and address issues faster. Also, your support agents can share their experience and expertise through specific knowledge base articles or how-to guides. You can link such materials from requests agents search in Confluence or share them via direct links.

You can set up your knowledge base using Confluence Cloud managed by Atlassian or Confluence Server managed by your company. In addition, in the setup mode, only the support team and administrators can see your content, not customers.

Step 2

You can significantly benefit from developing your Help Center’s structure and customization options to meet your business preferences. Such options include translations, logo, banner image, text color, login message, etc. All the changes made to the help center will be demonstrated in all your company’s portals. But you must serve as a Jira administrator to have customization capabilities:

Thus, if you want to customize your help center’s loom and feel:

1. Click on Settings () > Products > Jira Service Management > Configuration.
2. Under Customize your help center, choose Manage look and feel, announcements, and login messages.
3. From the opening customization panel, choose Customize look and feel.
4. Make necessary changes and choose Save changes.

Thanks to the customize panel, you can do different things, including:

• Adding a help center announcement;
• Adding a relevant announcement to the log-in screen;
• Providing your help center with a name;
• Adding a logo;
• Adding a banner, or selecting a banner background color;
• Changing the color of components. 

When it comes to your organization’s logo, you can use accepted formats like JPEG, GIF, or PNG. Its maximum size cannot exceed 10MB. Also, your help center will render the logo using the height of 40 pixels. Meanwhile, the recommended size for your banner image is 1680x360 pixels. 

After customizing the necessary elements, you should test the performance of your Help Center on various browsers. That helps understand whether everything is displayed correctly. Besides, it is crucial to establish a default language before adding or importing articles. 

Adding your content is also a critical step. Your company can migrate the existing information or create new brand content pieces. However, you should update links for multiple articles imported from your old help desk platform. That is because the API-based migration tools can switch only content, not links. 

Ultimately, when building a new knowledge base, your organization can create different categories, sections, and community topics. 

Step 3

After configuring all settings and customizations, your company can activate a service desk platform and make it visible to clients. In turn, clients can read articles available in your help center and mark them as helpful. But if, after reading a relevant article, they still need to contact support agents, they can choose the most suitable request type. Customers can also browse each portal they can access. In addition, clients can view each request they have made via the Request button located in the top right corner of the screen.

For sharing your help center with clients, you have to provide them with the following link:

http://<computer_name_or_IP_address>:<http_port_number>/jira/servicedesk/customer/portals 

Apart from that, you can add customers to a specific service project. That allows them to gain an account in your help center. Ultimately, you can select what customers can make requests in the help center and who they can share these requests with.

#4. Make Your Company’s Life Easier

Streamlining business processes is among the most critical reasons to migrate to the new service desk platform. That allows your company to manage tickets more efficiently and improve macros and business rules like automation and triggers. As such things are unique to the organization’s workflow, they cannot serve as ready-to-use features after the migration. It means that you have to configure them manually.

Control Ticket Lifecycles 

In Jira Service Management, you can use Views for arranging tickets at all phases in their workflow. The platform allows you to create different groups of tickets because the support team moves them through the relevant funnel for fixing their status. There are predefined and editable views that Jira Service Management has developed depending on the most efficient client support practices.

For instance, a suite of available views includes such types of tickets:

• unsolved;
• unassigned;
• recently updated;
• new tickets in groups;
• pending;
• recently solved;
• unsolved;
• suspended.

You can use ticket priorities for allocating them into relevant views. Thus, you may see the same ticket displayed in various views. Besides, you can edit the current views or create custom ones using the selected conditions for your tickets.

How to Automate Replies to Common Questions?

All support agents deal with numerous recurring questions from clients regarding functions that your company does not offer, pricing tiers, etc. Fortunately, you can apply predefined responses called macros to address such requests. Also, you can add macros to tickets.

Using macros will help your support team save time since they can use the same answer to multiple clients. For example, you can create a new text or provide the already existing answer. Moreover, you can implement different specific rules referring to all support agents, private, or a chosen group of employees.

If you need to create a new user macro:

1. Go to Settings > General Configuration > User Macros
2. Select Create a User Macro
3. Enter the necessary macro details
4. Click Add

If you need to edit a user macro:

1. Go to Settings > General Configuration > User Macros
2. Click Edit (located next to the required macro)
3. Write new macro details
4. Click Save

Business Rules in Jira Service Management

A business rule is considered a suite of necessary actions. These actions are applied automatically to a relevant ticket if it refers to previously defined conditions. 

Automation enables your support agents to focus on the core functions and eliminates the need to conduct different manual, repetitive tasks. That also allows the support team to automate critical processes and workflows. Thanks to Jira’s rule builder, organizations can establish powerful automation rules for handling even the most complicated scenarios.

Below, we have briefly described the four key concepts of automation in Jira.

Rules

With rules, you can automate numerous actions within your platform depending on previously defined criteria. In Jira, automation rules consist of three components:

• triggers (they kick off rules);
• conditions (they refine rules);
• actions (they carry out tasks on your site). 

Thus, triggers, conditions, and actions serve as essential building blocks of Jira automation.

Triggers

Each rule begins with a relevant trigger that kickoffs its execution. Triggers are responsible for listening for specific events in Jira, like creating an issue or changing a field value. They can be configured to run using a schedule, or you can customize them before applying to the rule.

Conditions

Thanks to conditions, you can narrow the rule’s scope. You should meet them since that allows your rule to keep running. For instance, you may configure the rule for escalating the issue when its priority is high. In the case of the failed condition, your rule will stop running. Also, any action that follows a relevant condition will not be conducted. 

Actions

Actions serve as the doers of a particular rule. They help your company automate tasks and provide your site with necessary changes. For example, with the help of actions, you can edit an issue, send a notification, and create sub-tasks.

How to Create an Automation Rule? 

Let’s imagine the following scenario when you have a newly reported bug. Now, your support agents should manually create relevant sub-tasks on this issue before assigning them to the user. But you can automate such a process easily. Everything you need is to create a simple rule that will automatically add necessary sub-tasks to each new bug. Also, this rule may even allow assigning them to specific users.

To build such a rule:

1. Go to your Automation settings and select Create rule in the top-right corner.
2. Choose the Issue created trigger, and click on Save.
3. Choose New condition, and choose the Issue fields condition.
4. Configure the condition in the following way:
   • Set the Field to Issue Type;
   • Set the Condition to equals;
   • Set the Value for comparing to Bug;
   • Click on Save.

1. Choose New action, and select the Create sub-tasks action.
2. Configure the action in the following way:
   • Add three sub-tasks, called Inspect code, Troubleshoot, and Resolve;
   • Click on Save.

1. Choose New action, and select the Assign issue action.
2. Choose a specific user and click on Save.
3. Provide your rule with a name, and select Turn it on.

#5. Integrations and Atlassian Marketplace 

Atlassian is famous worldwide due to its outstanding marketplace that offers numerous integrations and applications. That helps facilitate the support team’s routine and improve the entire business performance. Thus, you may find the necessary tools easily and provide their integration with your Jira Service Management account to promote efficient work.

Conclusion

Data import and data migration require many preparations and steps to take. If your company wants to make a process successful, you need to consider all potential risks. Also, you should create a well-developed plan to overcome them. Of course, the pre-migration and migration phases are crucial. But the post-migration one needs some time and relevant preparations to ensure that processes perform as they were expected. So, take your time to configure Jira Service Management and provide your clients with a memorable experience. 

Part 1. How to Prepare for Jira Service Management Import

Part 2. Data Import to Jira Service Management: Whats, Whys, and Hows