Core Systems IT Kft., which has been operating for 13 years, is a classic IT outsourcer. In addition to basic administration services, they provide their clients with an entire IT department, complete with helpdesk and maintenance team, client managers and project leaders. In their everyday work, a team of around 20 serves more than 50 clients, with a base of over 1,000 end users.

Jira – Love at first sight

The extensive client and user base means that the company actively searched the market for a solution to facilitate its routine service desk tasks for clients and team members. At a META-INF Atlassian Day in the summer of 2017, the company's leadership finally first truly encountered Jira. In their own words, it was "love at first sight."

"We were really captivated by the whole mentality, the way of thinking, and how Atlassian takes care of teamwork and efficiency," Richárd Horváth, CEO, Core Systems Informatika Kft.

Total transformation in under a year

Jira left a deep impression on them, and they clearly saw the future of their service desk services on the platform.

Of course, they soon recognized that they needed a Jira-proficient partner for the transformation, so they contacted the expert team at META-INF, who they already knew well from Atlassian Day.

During an autumn meeting, the two parties laid down the main aspects of the plan:

1. Fundamental goals
2. How the Atlassian ecosystem can help achieve these goals
3. What areas compromises might have to be reached
4. What the first steps are on the path to a complete transition

Then, in a joint workshop in December 2017, an on-premise service desk project was configured on an on-premise server, backed by a software project, with the two connected by a relatively simple escalation process. The first workflows were also configured.

Although there was an extended learning period after the launch as staff got to grips with the new platform, adapted it to their specific needs and began to master it, just a year after the watershed Atlassian Day, the company's first client began actively using Jira for its daily service desk workflows.

What's the system like?

With Jira Service Desk, for most clients, a joint project is used, though 14 clients belong to special projects, with their own mailboxes. Every request goes through Jira, even if it's reported by phone or via email, though naturally the company’s team also continually educates and encourages the clients to use the portal. With Service Desk projects, staff can escalate to the maintenance team, management or procurement, with the escalation linked to the workspaces of the teams.

In terms of operation, the system runs as a software project, complete with Kanban boards that make the system visually clear and easy to use.

Both customer management and procurement have their own Jira core projects with escalations and workflow post functions, which means that everyone can see their own issues in their own interface.

Apps, add-ons

As in most cases, Core Systems also perfects the operation of their service desk interfaces with the help of apps and add-ons from Atlassian Marketplace. This help optimize the systems to ensure an even more compelling user experience. So which apps and add-ons did they find the most useful?

"The Marketplace is one of the best things about Atlassian. We love it. There is no problem that we couldn't find an app for on the Marketplace,"
Richárd Horváth, CEO, Core Systems Informatika Kft.

• Thanks to the Queues for Jira Service Management app, the staff can see the issues allocated to them on a single interface, regardless of which project they belong to.
• Extensions for Jira Service Management is a must-have for customer portal operators: it makes it easy to post who is responsible for the portals, make specific attachments readily available, and restrict the visibility of certain issues to specific groups.
• After a recommendation from META-IN, Tempo Timesheets was also added, which significantly eased the planning and reporting.
• With the help of Pivot Report, it's possible to generate reports with a single click.
• To handle the continued large number of email requests, almost all team members use Outlook Email for Jira, which helps to quickly create Jira notes or comments based on the emails.
• The Repeating Issues add-on helps to automatically and continuously create regular and repetitive tasks.

The Insight app, which contains the Asset Management tool, is particularly worthy of mention. This was used to implement complete device and configuration management, as well as to access client servers and services in a transparent and easily updatable manner. This is linked to a Confluence-based customer knowledge base, which uses Insight macros to provide organized access to important objects such as sites, servers, business services, certificates, and Wi-Fi networks or domains for each customer.

Results

Although it took half a year and many hours of work to complete the transition and perfect the interface, the result was rewarding for both the company and its customers.

The flexibility of Jira, the openness of the Atlassian Marketplace, and the wide range of applications and add-ons it provides have enabled the company to improve the efficiency and speed of its services and customer support. The environment also offers several opportunities for future developments. The company has designed an efficient and transparent service desk system that effortlessly handles the everyday challenges that come with a user base of more than 1,000 people.

Source: Complete IT department with an Atlassian armory | Atlassian Meetup, 2021 - YouTube