Atlassian Corporation PLC: Realizing Performance-Driven IT Team

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Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder & Co-CEO

A person standing across the road takes out a mobile phone from his pocket, fidgets with it for a few seconds and keeps it back into its place. A few minutes later, he answers a call while gazing on the other side of the road. The next moment, a car stops in front of him, and he disconnects the call and boards the car. So, what happened here? This person, who had to reach a destination, booked a car through the Uber app in his phone, and within a few minutes, he was traveling conveniently. Digitally-driven cab aggregation applications, such as Uber, have revolutionized the way people move from one place to the other. This is just a relatable example of how digital mobile apps and services are becoming critical in the daily life of every individual. Now, imagine how this rapidly changing digital landscape is churning the activities of the businesses and their IT teams who are responsible for delivering these services. IT teams specifically are on the hook to maintain enterprise-class SLAs, high service availability, and quality of service, all with the current services and infrastructure load, while still struggling to better align with the needs of software teams.

But why is that so? The answer to this question comes loud and clear in the form of traditional ITSM tools that are extremely rigid with little or zero flexibility to be customized and be adapted to the current requirements of the IT teams. There are also multiple tools for different IT processes, which act as barriers, obstructing visibility across teams—stifling collaboration and innovation. Another outlook that stands out is that Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the gold standard of processes for IT teams, which has historically yielded significant value. However, the lack of compatibility of ITIL and legacy tools have left IT teams with choices of either changing their support process or having an IT solution that adapts to their needs. In an environment where IT teams think of service desk tool for incidents and service requests management, and require separate tools for the problem and change management, Atlassian Corporation Plc’s approach to ITSM is based on the needs of the project to make it easy for IT teams to collaborate in real time.

Atlassian’s approach to ITSM is based on the needs of the project to make it easy for IT Teams collaborate in realtime

Atlassian, a company that provides efficient tools to help every team unleash their full potential, has magic wands in store for IT teams that will allow them to excel and achieve greater agility.

Atlassian’s redefinition of ITSM as the optimization of service delivery to provide value to customers in the form of services syncs well with today’s business goals of high-value applications and digital services they deliver to their customers. The project-based approach of the company helps organizations to have a single solution for the team to collaborate and work on issues that scared them the most, with their own workflows, data schemas, screens, SLAs, and reports while gaining end-to-end visibility to IT management. As a company that architects collaboration tools for teams, Jira Service Desk is at the heart of the Atlassian’s approach to ITSM. As a collaborative service desk, Jira Service Desk is purpose-built for IT teams. Implementing DevOps, Atlassian has given significant attention to a high value on transparency for teams to avoid the “silo” mentality and keep lines of communication always open. Frequent collaboration between IT and software development teams is now seamless, helping them solve problems faster as they can easily link, track, and automate issue tracking from inception to resolution, across teams. With visibility into the queue, experts can get themselves involved in the process to solve issues faster, so developers and IT staff can solely focus on delivering better software and services.

On integrating Atlassian’s content collaboration software, Confluence, with Jira Service Desk, firms can minimize customer tickets by turning their service desk into a virtual self-service kiosk. In addition, the company also offers Jira Ops, a solution that provides IT teams a central hub to their incidents, to initiate incident management workflows and continuously improve processes. Jira Ops is an efficient and consistent way to respond to every incident. While deploying these solutions, there is no additional learning curve for the IT team and requires no cobbling of different modules. With Atlassian’s solutions, businesses just need to create projects, mapping incidents to problems and to change requests. The creation of a project allows for a logical division of data and processes to help IT teams stay organized.

Delivering Extra Value

With these solutions and their unique approach, Atlassian has made a cut above others in the industry and has helped IT teams of various organizations across industries to operate in a modern workplace where they can deliver better service, resolve issues faster, and drive business value. The instance of the engagement of Domino’s Pizza with Atlassian presents a strong case here. Domino’s, well-known for its quick service to satisfy hunger pangs for delicious pizzas, gives its customers the freedom to order pizza through phone apps, Facebook, Twitter, Alexa, and the Domino’s website. But, with these gateways to place an order for pizza, the demand seemed to only rise. To ensure a seamless customer experience irrespective of the platform, Domino’s’ IT team needed a way to streamline their DevOps process. Domino’s IT team relies on DevOps best practices to get pizza delivery innovations into the hands of consumers around the world. However, guaranteed technology security became a hurdle in the DevOps workflow, with developers tagging security input into projects too late in the process.

Domino’s’ security teams inspected the tools that DevOps team used to drive its workflow. It turned out that they relied on Atlassian’s Confluence to create and share specifications, and used Jira Software to track and manage tickets and tasks. The security team soon realized that even they could implement Atlassian’s tools to connect with developers and streamline the DevOps process. Without delay, Domino’s rushed to Forty8Fifty Labs, an authorized Atlassian partner, to build an app that used Confluence and Jira to link security to DevOps workflows. Forty8Fifty Labs worked in association with the Domino’s’ security team and created a 10-question Confluence form that generated Jira tickets based on the answers. Now the security team too joined the workflow that already worked well. What required more than 20 hours of meetings and review now took a few minutes to fill out the form, and about four minutes to get back the corresponding Jira security requirement tickets. With Atlassian’s app, Domino’s successfully automated a unique workflow and broke the barriers between security and development.

In an era where unlimited software-based services are available at fingertips, the IT arena must change to leap beyond just fixing incidents to enable the IT teams of a business to perform to their maximum potential. Atlassian aims to catalyze the necessary change in ITSM with its efforts and strategic approach.

- Daniel Holmes
March 21, 2019