What do Brooks Running and Applied Systems have in common? When it comes to service management, quite a bit!
At Atlassian’s Team ’24 conference, IT leaders from both organizations shared their direct experience and perspective on how they made the switch from a traditional ITSM vendor, ServiceNow, to Jira Service Management for high-velocity service management.
Here are 5 key takeaways from IT leaders whose organizations have switched to Jira Service Management.
1. Evaluate how and if your current solution meets your needs and the costs required to do so.
This evaluation is important because we repeatedly heard that as organizations grew and matured, their legacy ITSM solutions didn’t meet their needs and they were spending too much while trying to make it work.
- Are your Dev, IT, and business teams able to work together seamlessly on your current solution?
- Are you required to purchase additional licenses and products to support flexibility and scalability?
- Does your current solution require a dedicated team or third-party resources to build and maintain it?
Often, the IT leaders found it difficult to get the additional funding and resources they needed to manage their legacy platform. When recalling his experience with Brooks Running’s former ITSM solution, ServiceNow, Senior Manager of Service Delivery George Lewis noted, “Costs and care-and-feeding [were the main issues], but the real tipping point was our growth.”
Bill Hall, Director of IT at Applied Systems, said his company’s leadership wouldn’t provide the headcount necessary to support their legacy ITSM platform, which was also ServiceNow. This resulted in a backlog of requests and an inability to keep up with business needs. “We were getting further and further away from what we needed,” said Hall.
In both organizations, dissatisfied IT teams were frustrated by issues with their legacy platform and began exploring Jira Service Management.
2. Involve multiple stakeholders in the evaluation process for a new solution.
A best practice among organizations that have migrated to Jira Service Management is to seek input from multiple stakeholders during the evaluation process to thoroughly understand each group’s needs. Consider involving your development and applications teams, operations teams, customer teams, and other potential users of the new solution.
With Brooks Running’s development and applications teams using Jira, George Lewis knew it was important to have input from them as well as key partners when considering Jira Service Management.
We reached out to our business, and we engaged them. We wanted to know what was missing from our implementation of ServiceNow and what they were looking for. As we started to look at their feedback, we realized that our implementation of ServiceNow was wholly untrusted . . . Nobody liked it.”
George Lewis, IT Service Delivery, Brooks Running
Knowing priorities of leadership and other key stakeholders can help streamline product evaluation. Among customers that have migrated to Jira Service Management, key factors cited for choosing Atlassian and Jira Service Management were:
- A desire to consolidate to one platform. Uniting Dev, IT, and business teams helps reduce the cost of using disparate solutions.
- A positive view of Atlassian’s open platform approach, especially compared to ServiceNow. Hall described this approach as, “Atlassian is not trying to be all things to all people. Atlassian has got the core platform and a well-documented open API. If there are things you want to integrate or do yourself, you can write the code or they’ve got a robust marketplace so you can pick the unique components that solve the problems your business has.”
- Securing strong leadership support. Organizations that are pleased with their Jira Service Management implementation successfully engaged their leadership, got buy-in, sponsorship, and strong support—initially and on an ongoing basis. This signals to the entire organization that Jira Service Management is a priority.
- Getting quick wins. Brooks Running chose to start its Jira Service Management implementation with its development and applications teams, which already had experience using Jira Service Management. These teams embraced the organization-wide decision to adopt Jira Service Management and immediately showed positive results. “It was a real easy, quick win,” said Lewis. This showed other teams the benefits and built positive momentum.
- Excitement about Atlassian’s investment in Jira Service Management and Jira Service Management’s roadmap, a reflection of commitment to innovation and enterprises’ short and long-term success.
Atlassian with Jira Service Management has a much better approach, in our opinion, to being able to pick and choose and customize the product to how we need it.”
Bill Hall, Director of IT, Applied Systems
3. Champion swift adoption for your new ITSM and ESM solution.
“Adoption is the key to the success of any tool deployment project. Even if a project hits every success measure, if the tool is not used, the entire investment is worthless.” notes Lewis.
Consider the value your ITSM solution can bring to non-IT teams for Enterprise Service Management (ESM). The benefits of improved collaboration, processes, and workflows don’t have to be limited to IT—teams like HR, Facilities, Legal, and Marketing can benefit tremendously from using a service management solution as well. In fact, Brooks Running has integrated Jira Service Management with their HRIS, which they use for onboarding new employees. Their manufacturing and distribution center teams are also starting to use Jira Service Management.
After making the switch from ServiceNow, Hall shared that Applied Systems uses Jira Service Management for IT teams and business teams alike. “Currently we use [Jira Service Management] for incident, request, change, asset management for ITSM. We have alerts for meeting SLAs and we use the integration with Confluence to pull JSM and Jira data for easier reporting and management oversight without manual copying of data.”
Hall added, “Customer Support, Procurement, Security, Customer Operations, Facilities, and Legal are also using Jira Service Management.”
4. Plan to overcome common roadblocks.
Ask anyone who has ever migrated to a new platform and they’ll tell you that things never go perfectly. Even among customers who said that migrating to Jira Service Management went smoothly, there were still roadblocks.
Tips for overcoming roadblocks include providing adequate training, furnishing sufficient project management resources, and avoiding scaling too quickly. Also, don’t just take existing processes from a legacy vendor and recreate them in Jira Service Management. Implementing a new tool like Jira Service Management presents an opportunity to understand user needs and create processes that support them through the tool. The most important step is being aware of potential roadblocks and planning accordingly.
Both Hall and Lewis agreed that one important way to overcome roadblocks is to work with an experienced solution provider that understands the Atlassian environment. Their organizations worked with ISOS Technology, which helped prevent roadblocks but responded quickly when issues arose. “Our project stumbled off the blocks,” said Lewis. “They elevated their game real quick and turned the project around.”
5. Measure the ROI of your migration.
Forrester calculates a 277% ROI of Atlassian for ITSM. Forrester Consulting conducted a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and through customer interviews and data aggregation, concluded that Jira Service Management has the following three-year financial impact:
- Realized a 277% return on investment (ROI)
- Recovered 115 hours per month for IT operations teams
- Improved service desk productivity by $1.4 million
- Saved $2.0 million by switching from a legacy ITSM product
At Brooks Running, the organization had previously struggled to show IT value. But immediately upon implementing Jira Service Management, Brooks was able to develop reports and dashboards and get data they never had access to before, in easily consumable ways.
At Applied Systems, Hall explained that implementing Jira Service Management meant fundamentally changing and improving how teams worked. Specifically, this meant that teams could make changes and updates on their own, eliminating virtually overnight the multi-year backlog that had existed with the company’s previous solution.
“Teams started making the updates and changes they wanted. As they were bringing on new capabilities and services, they were supporting new things across the company,” said Hall, who added, “The teams were loving this . . . We put the ability to make updates in the hands of project teams. They loved it and it was a huge win across the board.”
Hall also said that since Applied Systems has adopted Jira Service Management, teams are asking if they can come onto the platform. Hall has seen improved SLAs, faster turnaround time, and great dashboards that provide better data.
I feel like Jira Service Management has democratized the ITSM platform to where teams are able to do a lot more themselves very easily. With the APIs and the integrations that are available, you can expand it and get significantly deeper, should you want to.”
Bill Hall, Director of IT, Applied Systems
Practical Tips for Getting Started with Jira Service Management
- Secure executive sponsorship and encourage leadership to hold the entire organization accountable for migrating to Jira Service Management. This is the starting point for any successful migration.
- Seek migration support from a partner. Brooks and Applied Systems both worked with Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner ISOS Technology. Hall commented that one detail he really liked about ISOS was that several people at the company had spent years doing ServiceNow implementations. They understood the Atlassian environment and how Atlassian works but also understood how ServiceNow operated. “That was a huge selling point for us,” said Hall.
- Decide early on about the data you want to put into the Jira Service Management platform, the organization’s KPIs, SLAs, and the data to pull out for reports. These decisions can have a major impact on the project timeline.
- Define company-wide standards on core processes that apply to every project.
- Define and focus on what truly adds value. Don’t try to do everything.
See why teams choose Jira Service Management over competitors like ServiceNow.
