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2017-06-26 Jira & Service Now Review: Harvard Business School

2017-06-26 Jira & Service Now Review: Harvard Business School

Owned by Kate Hathaway (Unlicensed)
Jun 27, 2017

Date

Attendees

Goals

  • Discuss how HBS is using JIRA and Service Now 

Discussion items

 Background: 

  • challenge around process-  initially using a different help desk tool and bugzilla for defects, project herd
  • Jira was best tool for development team
  • Planning on activate change management module in SN - not yet automated
  • Exploring bi-directional approach

How they are using Jira/SN integration:

  • They use service now for intake of all incidents. Once help desk has determined that it is development process, they are hands off. Development team reports out on status changes to affected parties (this is part of the process flow since there is no bi-directional sync between JIRA and ServiceNow)
  • Created a uni-directional feed from SN that feeds into the backlog of one generic kanban board that is reviewed weekly. Also review with key customers to prioritize tasks in backlog an show what is in progress. 

  • Anything through help desk turns into a Jira ticket - wrote a script that runs on a timer and pulls SN info using API and writes it into new stories into the specified Jira location based on "tag" 

  • Two types of work: Discretionary vs. non discretionary

Work that is in JIRA:

  1. Maintenance board (review every week: bugs, small enhancements, ops stuff)

  2. Per-project (log a defect in SN and that flows to a specific Jira project) - Projects that run 6-12 month projects where bugs will be logged against the project 
    1. PM goes in and requests that the project be mapped to SN
    2. Sync by ServiceNow Project ID: convention to have the Jira project include the same ID
  3. Development projects - stories that developers work originate within Jira


Standalone Dashboard for high level view of total work:

  • Created dashboards - webpage that makes SN web call to Jira and SN to show all the work
  • Dynamic view: assignments tab, support tab - all the work that has gone, by age what
  • Webpage that makes API calls out to SOLR


Other notes:

  • QA Team: Test Rails, Zephyr - this is stuck. Reinvesting in use of selenium for test automation
  • Time tracking: Changepoint ID - hours tracking (had a bar chart of where hours were spent and by who) 


Key Takeaways

  1. No bi-directional integration or automated Change Process (change module yet to be enabled) 
  2. They created a standalone app to be able to see all work being done in ServiceNow and in JIRA**