Atlassian migration for IATA

Solution

Our Atlassian team analyzed the project requirements and, over the course of six months, carried out the following groups of tasks:

• Discovery and demo sessions
• Jira Service Desk implementation
• ServiceNow data migration
• Admin training sessions

Analysis

During the analysis phase, our Atlassian experts met with the owners of different processes, collected their requirements, and adapted them to the Jira Service Desk capabilities. Apart from this, the team examined the customer’s existing ServiceNow setup, including the following processes:

The analysis gave us an insight into IATA’s work processes and helped us understand how we could improve certain workflows when implemented in the Jira Service Desk.

Finally, we carried out nine Jira Service Desk demo sessions, demonstrating the solution’s out-of-the-box functionality and processes management features to the customer. 

Jira Service Desk implementation 

First, our team set up a test environment and deployed a production environment backup to it. Next, we set up the following processes and functionality in Jira Service Desk, configuring them according to the customer’s needs:

• Issue types and workflow schemes
• Custom fields, screens, and screen schemes
• Jira Service Desk customer portal and request types
• Project automation rules
• Agent queues
• SLAs, including calendars for different teams
• Global project notifications and permissions, including customer notifications and permissions
• Project reports, filters, and dashboards

Upon the setup, we conducted demonstrations for the process owners and made adjustments when needed.

The customer’s QA team conducted automated process testing using autotests and the Tricentis Tosca testing tool, while we performed manual testing. The customer’s test lead worked closely with our team and reported all issues and bugs to our team. We tracked test results in Tosca and used Jira to track detected faults.

During user acceptance testing, IATA’s employees interacted with the Jira Service Desk setup as they would in real life, while our team quickly fixed bugs they found.  

Saving changes in the test environment, we moved the setup to the production environment, transferring all configuration settings, and then conducted smoke testing to find and fix the remaining bugs that resulted specifically from manual configurations.

ServiceNow data migration

Next, we transferred data from the legacy ServiceNow to the new Jira Service Desk production environment. Step by step, we migrated several thousands of open ServiceNow tickets, including incidents, service requests, problems, changes, and enhancements, via CSV import. Before finalizing the migration, we conducted test runs in the test environment and conducted data mapping. 

During four weeks after the Jira Service Desk rollout, Itransition provided supplemental support to the customer, facilitating user transition to the new system and taking care of any arising issues, bugs, or incidents.

Process automation

Our Atlassian team managed to meet all of the customer’s requirements with the out-of-the-box Jira Service Desk functionality, without customizations or third-party plugins. To implement complicated features, we configured 110 automation rules that support core project processes, such as:

• The synchronization of Jira Service Desk issue statuses with linked tasks from the software development project in Jira.
• Adding approvers from different groups according to the request type and status.
• Adding an employee’s line or resource manager from user properties synced from AD and setting the Line Manager as an approver.

The standard Jira Service Desk functionality does not support group assignments but the customer requested it, so we delivered this feature through configuration. For this, we created a custom Group Picker field, added it to all requests, modified the notification scheme, created a project property connecting the new field with the customers’ apps, and introduced automation for group assignment.

Another workflow that needed fine-tuning was the IT Catalog process for ordering office equipment and supplies. The customer wanted their Jira Service Desk to provide office administrators the price data for each item, so we implemented a workaround in the request form. Now, when choosing a product in the form, the user gets a link to the corresponding regional Confluence page, containing the product description, photo, specifications, and price information.

Our team also automated onboarding and offboarding processes for IATA’s internal and external employees, including AD account creation and extension, office move, and departure.

Admin training sessions

For the customer’s admin team, our specialists carried out 31 Jira Service Desk training sessions on such topics as:

• Jira Service Desk essentials 
• Jira Service Desk schemes
• Jira Service Desk settings
• Process configuration and administration
• Change requests handling
• Global settings management 
• Projects creation
• Project permissions and workflow properties setup

 

Each training session had a structured agenda and included tips, quizzes, and sometimes homework. We also provided trainees with useful links and additional learning materials, both online and offline, to help them better retain Jira Service Desk admin knowledge and skills down the line. When the training was complete, we carried out a Q&A session.

Results

Itransition implemented Jira Service Desk Cloud, migrated data from the customer’s ServiceNow support system to it, and automated a number of administrative workflows. Afterward, our specialists conducted a number of admin and user training sessions to accelerate employee onboarding. 

The project resulted in:

• $200k license savings
• 4.8 out of 5 satisfaction rate 
• The lowest amount of issues detected during testing compared to the customers’ other projects