Össur boosts speed and service with Jira Service Management

Helping people live – and work – without limitations

When Össur Kristinsson (an amputee and prosthetics specialist) founded a company to help other amputee patients in 1971, even he couldn’t have imagined how many lives his products would change. Fast forward 50-plus years, and the firm has grown into a leading mobility solutions provider with more than 4,000 employees worldwide.

Today, the company (named after Össur himself) is on a mission to help people “live life without limitations” by creating revolutionary prosthetics for everyone from the typical patient to Paralympic athletes – a journey that has been both fulfilling and challenging for the business. 

As Össur scaled and ventured into tech-enabled prosthetics, such as ankles with AI sensors and bionic knees, IT expanded to include experts in development, operations, and support. These employees needed to work together to create products and support patients, but Össur’s infrastructure made it difficult to do so. They were using a disparate collection of tools for IT service management, including Salesforce, FogBugz, and Zendesk, but teams were craving a more robust, integrated platform to centralize their documentation and connect with each other. “What we wanted and needed was to get all of the people across these disciplines on the same platform,” says Senior Applications Engineer Valgeir Sigurdsson.

Össur’s engineers had been using Jira Software, Confluence, and Bitbucket since 2016, so adding Jira Service Management was a natural fit and offered several benefits that enticed their teams. In addition to meeting their need for centralized documentation and collaboration, the solution’s easy setup, customizations, and automations would help Össur unlock new efficiencies and capabilities. 

Premium self-service, visibility, and value

Since implementing Jira Service Management and connecting it with Confluence, all of Össur’s agents can search for documentation and answer questions themselves instead of relying on a small number of internal subject matter experts. Valgeir says, “Our Atlassian tools are helping internal agents do their job better. Our documentation and internal knowledge are in a way better place than they were before.”

As Össur expanded their use of the platform, they upgraded to Jira Service Management Premium to take advantage of more advanced capabilities, such as asset and configuration management. The native Assets tool has been particularly helpful for tracking and managing almost 400 applications. Valgeir says the previous lack of centralized data around application inventory, purpose, usage, ownership, costs, and more was creating a “massive problem.” 

Now with Assets as the system of record, Össur has complete visibility into this information, all in one centralized platform that connects with their vendor management system. “The beauty of Assets is that now we're able to assign owners to all of these applications,” Valgeir explains. “Somebody's responsible for these applications and the costs that we get from them. This also helps us find duplicate applications that do the same thing, which reduces costs.” Given the improvements in visibility and application tracking with Assets, Össur is planning to use the tool to track physical assets next.

One source of truth drives exponential increases in adoption and engagement

As IT employees adopted the solution, business teams throughout the organization started asking to use it with their own internal customers. “As soon as we started implementing Jira Service Management for IT support, more people wanted it. It has grown quite organically within the company. I have never had to sell the product to all the departments. They've usually just come to me,” Valgeir says. “There has been exponential growth. We've gone from around 60 users using Atlassian products to about 1,200 licensed users…The decision has really paid off.”

Today, teams in technology, R&D design, marketing, web, and more use over 30 service desks, integrated with Össur’s other Atlassian tools, as a single source of truth and a central platform for everyone to work on. For example, the Prototyping Team relies on the solution to automate the process of requesting prototypes, collaborate with adjacent teams on delivery, and log their time accurately. “Jira Service Management definitely increases the pace of the development of products and components, and allows us to track the work much better,” Valgeir says.

Speaking of exponential improvements, Össur has also used Jira Service Management to make meaningful improvements to the company culture as they scale. For example, the Icelandic office used to have a suggestion box in SharePoint, where employees could submit ideas for improvements to the workplace experience. However, the volume of suggestions was getting unwieldy. Migrating this suggestion workflow to Jira Service Management has reduced friction for requesters and implementers, leading to an increase in the number of suggestions while also making it easier to manage and track execution. “In the first year of managing our suggestion box in Jira Service Management, we received over 21,000 suggestions and jumped from 1,100 suggestions implemented to over 1,400. That’s a record, and it’s because it was easy to use for everybody,” Valgeir says.

A “priceless” solution that “makes a massive difference”

Now that so many cross-discipline departments are working together on one platform, Össur’s teams are exploring how to use the solution to work even faster, take their service to the next level, and improve the experience for employees and patients. “When you have a solution that is so easy to use for both the end user and for the team that is working on the actual requests, it makes a massive difference,” Valgeir says. “[The solution] has become one whole package and an integral part of everything we do. We have development teams working with IT service management, and that ability to connect dev teams to Jira Service Management is priceless.”

As Össur plans to build out additional features and workflows, such as tracking physical assets and rolling out incident management, they look forward to using Jira Service Management as a key ingredient to help people around the world – both employees and patients – live life without limitations.