How to IT Service Management (Part 1): Operational Support - the Service Desk Portal - News, tips & guidance for agile, development, Atlassian-Software (JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, ...) and Google Cloud

Problems with Atlassian software quickly solved - Seibert Media's operational support

"Oh noooooooooooooooo!" Every network admin has heard of this disastrous scenario in which colleagues whispered to one another behind closed doors. Picture this: User Williams phones in - "I was just about to close a huge deal, but the system crashed!" he yelled into the phone, which everyone could hear, even though it wasn't even on speaker. As if it had been a secret signal, suddenly all the phones were ringing off the hook, and a timid "Please open a ticket" was met with a rude "If the f****** thing would work, I would!"

The culprit of the drama: a server that went down, which resulted in angry and desperate users and admins, who would spend the next few hours trying to get the server up and running again. Also, because admins had more work calming down users than troubleshooting, all you would get when phoning the IT department was a lovely song, over and over and over again... It is precisely one of those days when you wonder if it was worth getting up.

It was and is precisely such scenarios that have led to some changes. After all, no company can afford to drive its IT staff into burnout or expose its customers' data to potential risks. And software vendors, conversely, know that they must provide reliable support to their customers for their products to be successful in the long run. Not to mention numerous companies that specialize in corresponding services.

IT Service Management at Seibert Media

Of course, this also applies to Seibert Media - a company that sells Atlassian licenses and corresponding services. We want our customers to be able to work well with our tools. This also means that we are there when something doesn't work or doesn't work properly.
But what exactly does that look like?

Option 1: Your company has purchased Atlassian licenses through us and contracted us to run and maintain your instances.

Option 2: You have a specific consulting request for Atlassian software.

In both cases, our IT service management strategy will take effect, and your path will lead you to our Jira service management portal - the central point of contact to which you, as a customer, also have automatic access.

The Service Desk Portal - a support channel made to measure

Let's say you need help with one of your Atlassian products - Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, or Bamboo. You can't get anywhere on your own. That's where our Jira Service Management Portal comes in!

In this portal, contact persons can actively help you with your problem. In this way, we ensure that you speak to employees on our side who know exactly which company is involved, which instances are hosted, and which Service Level Agreements or other agreements you have concluded with us. This, in turn, impacts the whole process of your ticket, as it sets data for, e.g., "time to first response" or "time to resolution," which correspond to your SLA.

How to use the Jira Service Management Portal

Of course, it's important that you tell us in the first step what kind of request you have in the first place - that's why you can select your request type:

Is it a malfunction or failure of your instance?
Do you or do users have specific problems with the instance, e.g., with the configuration or a faulty app?
Do you need to make changes or update the instance?
Or do you need support from one of our consultants as part of your consulting contract?

Based on the information you provide, we categorize your request. If it is a "Service Request," it follows a simple workflow according to your defined SLA.

If it's an "incident" where quick help is the top priority, things are slightly different: While the workflow is almost identical, incidents are based on a tighter SLA. It is also possible to escalate the issue, which changes the prioritization in terms of urgency. The service owner is also notified in this case.

What's behind it - so you always talk to the right experts

Behind this is our asset management - an important building block in our service management configuration. The basis for this is you as a Jira user (and any other of our customers) or your email address ("contact object"). Based on the address, you are automatically assigned correctly.

The contact record is stored in our ERP system, where the link to you and your company as a customer is maintained ("customer object"). Here we have collected the necessary data about your company, including contact persons on your side and ours. And linked to this record, in turn, is information about the systems/hosting instances you operate, i.e., Atlassian systems such as Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, or Bamboo. The system record contains all the important info like the app version, host entries for access, any essential information about the system itself, etc.

So all the information around you as a Jira user/admin is mapped and linked on multiple levels. What does this do for you? This means that when you contact us with a specific request, you can directly select the affected system (from those assigned to you), and no one has to search around for a long time until the right instance is found, along with the associated agreements. A classic win-win situation!

IT service management means continuous improvement

As you can see: As a customer of Seibert Media, you don't have to be afraid that a server will break down and nothing works anymore. And you also know exactly how we work to solve an IT problem as quickly as possible. Because we want our customers to be able to add value, you need best practices (ITIL) and years of experience. But as an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we have the latter anyway.

Do you want to know more about our operations support or have specific questions? Contact us and make an appointment with our colleague Kai, an ITSM specialist. We will be happy to help you!

How to IT Service Management (Part 1): Operational Support – the Service Desk Portal