What needs improvement with JIRA Service Management?

JIRA Service Management is costly. The pricing structure needs improvement. When I add some plugins, I have to pay the cost for every user whether they are using it or not. For smaller companies, the detailed workflow editing and the kind of details that JIRA Service Management provides would be complex. For startups and smaller companies, JIRA Service Management would be complex. The cloud offering is easier because I don't have to manage the infrastructure. There are two templates of the project: company-managed and team-managed. Team-managed is a newer feature, which is good for startup-kind companies where they don't need control over data from multiple projects displaying in one dashboard. For startups, JIRA Service Management is somewhat complex with its schemes and everything. Capacity management should be improved in terms of additional features in the next release of JIRA Service Management.

There is potential for improvement in incorporating AI tools for JIRA stories. We have many AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gamma for PowerPoint presentations. We need to consider which AI tool would be most suitable for our project.

I am not familiar if there's an integration with Visual Studio from Jira.

One thing I would suggest is that before we create an epic, we mention the required stories in its description. Then AI could directly create those stories instead of doing it manually inside the table, so that integration can occur.

The interface could be made easier to use. While it is not the worst, there is still room for improvement.

Jira Service Management could improve by offering more control similar to Monday.com, such as easier automations, file addition, and sharing with different people.

The platform should be more user-friendly. JIRA's user interface needs training to understand and utilize. There is a need to limit the information in one window to avoid overwhelming users with unnecessary data.

There should be some AI integrations now as AI is in the picture. One should have some risk analysis done and auto code analysis done on the ticket.

It should be easier to log in. When I first tried to log into Jira, I faced issues accessing my company account.

There is room for improvement in the user interface and the queues. Currently, the queues, which list all issues, do not allow resizing of columns and appear primitive compared to filters. Enhancing the queue interface would align it more closely with the sophisticated filter reports.

It would be beneficial if we could turn comments into subtasks or other JIRA tickets directly. If this feature could be added, it would enhance the user experience.

The product does not allow customization of reports. Only specific out-of-the-box reports are available, so you cannot customize reports very easily, which is a drawback. It is meant for some complex environments, making it a tool that is not easy to use. You need to get a minimum amount of training on the system to be able to use the product.

JIRA Service Management could include more AI features.

Field addition and removal features are not very intuitive in JIRA Service Management.

The search function could be improved. We have to search a certain way. There is no generic search, it is more object-oriented search. The interface could also be more user-friendly. So, the interface and search could be improved. Additionally, I would like to see more accessibility. It would also be great if there was a Jira mobile app.

One area I see for improvement is the custom options for marking an idea as obsolete. Currently, there are options like "not started" or "not working," but in today's rapidly changing tech world, some ideas can become obsolete quickly. For example, technology may become obsolete or a product may no longer be able to cater to a certain idea due to business pivots or changes in the product strategy. However, there is no specific option to indicate why an idea is considered obsolete, whether it's due to technological changes, business model shifts, or other reasons. Capturing these business-driven changes is not easy within the current setup. It would be beneficial to have a configurable drop-down where we can filter and categorize the reasons for obsolescence, including technical, standard cases, and, importantly, business reasons. If such an option already exists, it might not have been effectively communicated to customers, as I haven't come across it yet within the customer community. It's essential to have clear ways to manage and track the obsolescence of ideas based on both technical and business considerations.

Jira Service Management should be more user-friendly, like other tools. We configure different projects on these tools, so it's okay for us, but Jira could be a little more simplified for clients. Similarly, there should be licenses for frequent and infrequent users.

In-built chat is missing in JIRA Service Management. To compensate for the missing in-built chat, we have been trying to gain leverage with Slack or Microsoft Teams at the moment since it is important to me who stands between the customer and the agent. The aforementioned area needs improvement because it is a very vital area. Suppose one can get on to something in JIRA Service Management that allows for communication. In that case, it is easier to solve a problem rather than communicate with JIRA through comments which will go back and forth. In short, an in-built chat option will be good for the solution.

I think test case management could be more efficient. It currently requires two plugins which makes it less effective. At the moment with Jira, there are various products not included in the license such as CI CD pipeline or Atlassian Bamboo. Even if you take a bundle, these products are considered separate. On the other hand, if you buy an enterprise version of Microsoft Azure DevOps, a competitor of Jira, it's a one-stop solution on a single platform.

When looking at the overall suite of tools, I know there's a problem with the administration side of things since I have never come across a person who I would say is an expert in the administration side of things. Some Jira products, or particularly this one, have a duplication of entries problem. That needs to be sanitized on a regular basis and that can itself prove cumbersome if the administrator is not a subject matter expert. The training manuals, patches, and release notes could be improved to be a bit more accessible. In the next release, this product should improve on the educational side to include webinars and training sessions. Also, I would like something that can measure better performance output. We're looking to use it more, particularly in the context of incident management and problem resolution. However, we're finding that, like everything else, there are always challenges with every tool. We've had to look at getting more training done because it's quite a steep curve for people who haven't used the solution. It's only a handful of us that have actually really been exposed to the Jira suite of tools, and we're gradually taking our time with it. The vendor, who is no longer in business, negated to tell us that the total cost of ownership was going to be quite steep. So normally you have tools where the total cost of ownership over a period of time, means it pays for itself either in terms of how you use it or in terms of how you implement it if you're servicing other third-party clients. However, because of the pandemic, our total cost of ownership has become a bit longer and it's taking more time to get to speed with how to get to use the tool, and how to get it customized in a particular manner. And then, over a period of time, we still have to "decide whether it is the most suitable in terms of a service management tools."

The product could improve its asset management.

Service Management is highly customizable, but I think it might be too customizable. If a company isn't aware of the best practices, it can easily mess something up. For example, you might try automating something that Jira doesn't support, and it could interfere with the product's out-of-the-box capabilities. Asset management should be built into Service Management. Typically, companies need both. You have to buy Atlassian's asset management solution separately. It could either be offered as a bundle or some lighter version of asset management could be included with Service Management.

The queries are weak and lack advanced functionality. You can do rudimentary queries, but you can't aggregate. You can't filter a lot of things that would be useful, so you need to use plugins to write writing advanced queries. I run into problems when working with different organizations because they always have restrictions on what kind of plugins they allow.

We have tried exporting some of the test cases into Jira from Excel. The interface for that isn't very user-friendly.

Service Management currently lacks an asset management module that can make deployment more difficult. We recently had to purchase SolarWinds Asset Management to cover that aspect.

Because it's a cloud platform, and because it's based on people subscribing to a platform, you end up with iterative improvements. I know a lot of users have said that they want a feature, for example, that was on the on-prem version of Jira or that the cloud version is missing, and the biggest issue, and this applies to a lot of cloud or SaaS platforms, is that the vendor can't deliver or do that. They're either unwilling or unable to give feature parity. The nature of a lot of SaaS solutions is that you can't always get the same thing. The other thing is that you may have a time lag where, suddenly, you don't have a feature anymore, and you have to log an improvement request and then wait for various other factors. Eventually, it might get progressed or it might get stopped. Probably the biggest downside is that you are locked into that model and you have to accept what you signed up for. You have some capacity to extend it with add-ins and things, but for the base feature set, you will always be at the mercy of the vendor. A lot of the integrations within the marketplace for Jira are all third parties, so a lot of the additional solutions that plug into other platforms are not written by Atlassian and that usually incurs an additional cost. It may not be the model they want and it would stifle competition and external people being able to contribute, but it would be good to see Atlassian provide more native integrations out of the box. I'm not against paying for integration if it's going to provide benefits, but it would be nice if Atlassian themselves were able to provide some things, at least at a basic level. I know third-party vendors can commit resources and probably have far more capability to deliver something that is feature-rich, but if you just want basic integration it would be nice to have it, rather than having to buy something when you may not need all of its functions.

Feature-wise, they are improving day by day. I cannot ask for any single feature. We have to worry about how they are increasing their price. Atlassian will increase the price by 5% for most of the tools. It's getting expensive. The deployment can be a bit complex, especially for those who are not technical.

While I really like Scriptrunner, there are behaviors we don't have in the cloud. In the cloud version, we need to do scripts and evaluators only. We don't have behaviors in the cloud. They need to do some updates in the cloud in future releases. For example, we have ten custom fields in the data center create screen. If you select the first custom field, it will drop-down automatically the following nine custom fields that need to be changed. Any unwanted fields need to be hidden automatically. When we use the behavior, it is in the data center server version. However, working on the cloud version, we don't have that behavior feature in Scriptrunner. We must go with the validators if we need to write any scripts in the cloud. Basically, the cloud and the server aren't identical. They work in slightly different ways and the new cloud isn't the same as the server. I'd like to update the dashboard so that more features are available.

I think that either a Gantt chart or a calendar view is something my management is used to seeing, and while they like the Sprint burndown charts, they would still like to see what is on the plan, and what is up and coming. I would like to see improvement in the ability to filter completed tasks.

JIRA Service could benefit from improvements to its voice support. We need to have quick customer care implementation for anyone trying to connect. The platform should connect to the solution.

We have a lot of add-ons, however, instead of the add-ons, for example, cloning could be better. When we do a clone of a particular issue, it needs to ask certain things like system fields at least, to copy them or not. One thing which I did not like, is whenever we are moving a request from one project to another project, if, during that time, for example, a resolution has been fixed and now I am moving that issue to a particular work in progress status, during that time the resolution needs to be clear. JIRA applications are not providing the information. It is not clearing it in the backend. If we are moving from one issue to another, we are waiting for support to resolve them. During that time window, a resolution is mandatory and it is not prompting us to resolve anything. Due to this, sometimes the reports might not get properly recorded.

The documentation needs improving because we have a lot of issues trying to find specific procedures. I'd also like to see an improvement with the inside discovery of assets.

The customizations in Jira could be improved by being simplified. They are currently very complex.

JIRA Service Management feature request List. The products functionally is expanding rapidly, hence there is a huge backlog of Jira product feature requests that are focused on the detail functionality. There is not enough effort focused on solving the detail functionality of Jira.

It's probably not fair of me to say because we weren't allowed to customize or configure anything. If I bought JIRA as a product, I could have it customized and configured, whereas I'm currently using a version of it provided by a much larger organization that is in line with the rest of the organization. As a result, it is not constructed in the manner that I would prefer. I would like to see the user interface changed, it is not very user-friendly, and it transitions workflows.

The product is supposed to include an interface where the customer can report issues, things they cannot resolve easily. It's not there at the moment so it's more difficult to resolve issues with the OEMs. We need to know how the customer is dealing with the product and what issues they might be having. If I'm unable to do that, I'll lose the business. It's what we need in terms of service management because if we had that feature we'd be able to show our customers how fast and efficient we are.

In the Turkish market, the biggest problem is that they are looking for a server type of solution, but when it comes to Jira Service Management, Atlassian is a remote type of license. There are just two different options, data center and cloud. When I was working at that company, we started to work with Central Bank of Turkey. We also worked with the defense industry. The biggest complaint was about data privacy. If Atlassian opened a data center in Turkey, that would be a very good solution for these kinds of companies. Some plugins could be implemented into Jira Service Management, like our plugin. We had our own plugin calculated each status and how much time the company spent in each status.

With respect to our help desk, we have been considering switching from ManageEngine to Jira so that we can have a single consolidated system for all the development life cycles. Jira has different modules that can develop workflow for demand management and project management, but the solution is no out of the box and would require lots of customization. The cost of switching has prohibited us from moving ahead with Jira as a service desk solution.

JIRA Service Management should make reporting easier. I would like something integrated with DevOps tools.

The initial setup is very complex.

If you raise a ticket with Jira, the portal doesn't enable any capability to see your other JIRA tickets, only the parts that are in the plugin for the service management. That's not a great experience because we have project teams that work out of their own Jira backlogs, so unless it's a link to a ticket in the JSM, there's no visibility for the customer in one single location.

The solution needs to be integrated better with Office X5. We use that often and need Jira to be able to effectively communicate it. Right now, my judgment of the solution is based on their trial version. I haven't likely experienced the full functionality and features that are already there. That's why I cannot give you the highest measurement for performance. A paid version may have much more to offer clients. I haven't experienced asset management within the product. In the IT field, assets are the biggest issue for the life cycle of any service within IT. I didn't see this part, and I'm not sure if that functionality is already presented within Jira. I saw it in other products, however, in Jira I didn't find it. Maybe it comes at an extra cost, and this is in a paid version.

It is pretty complex to move between the test environment and the production environment. There is potential for improvement. Security is always an issue with every tool. So, everything can be more secure.

The way it handles subtasks can be improved. We would really like the ability to have different types of subtasks. If we have a user story for a feature, we would like to have a subtask for documentation, a subtask for requirements, a subtask for development, and a subtask for testing. Right now, we just make four subtasks, but there is no way to specify their type, so we have to add a custom field to specify what type of work is this. It just means you've got to look at more data. For logging time or time tracking, we would like to have something using which we can define the work type we're doing. We would like to log whether we're working on a bug, a new development, scope change, or rework. We've got a user story for which we do the dev, and then we have to do more dev. It is the same story, but some of it could have been a scope change, and some of it could be a rework because we either screwed up the first time or missed something obvious. Currently, we have to have a custom field and track that separately. It would be nice to have some kind of work type for logging time.

There should be better connections with access management. They should improve the connectivity.

I think there are other IT ticketing tools that are better in terms of routing or work flows than Jira Service Desk. If you work at an enterprise size company, it might be preferable to use ServiceNow than Jira Service Desk which is better for smaller companies. I'd like to see a well integrated solution. For example, if I wanted to do some testing, I don't want to have to buy another testing tool and integrate it with Jira. If Jira had a place for it to connect the requirements to the testing, that would be amazing.

For us, one of the weaknesses of Service Desk is that we can not check every issue in the queue raised for one product. If we have more than one customer using a product that has raised a ticket, we can not see the complete list of issues for the one product from all sources. It is not as easy or efficient to handle tickets without that capability. For this reason, we have an add-on administrative tool that we had to purchase separately for use with JIRA to help make the workflow more efficient. This could be added to the base product for all users.

If we could have more Queue Management within Jira itself, instead of purchasing Jira Services as an add-on, it would be better. We purchased the add-on called Diviniti Queues that give us some priority settings for all of the queues of aggregation. The single sign-on has some stability issues that need to be improved. If we can have an easier way to deploy this solution without the help of a consultant and a more reliable way of deploying procedures, it would be quite helpful. It's difficult to deploy. I would like to see improvements made to the interface to make it more user-friendly. There is too much information on the screen. Also, user experience management. What they have now is a screen full of data fields that are scattered everywhere. If we could reduce the amount of information we are giving to the users then it would be much easier.

They need to work on the speed of Jira. I would like to see a portal that supports communication between team members, where they are all notified about progress on a ticket.

From the customer side, it's not friendly used compared to other competitors, like ServiceNow or BMC. It's also not fully ITSM management if you compare it with ServiceNow or BMC. They have a full model of ITSM. In BMC they have TrueSight, they have Discovery, which helps IT to discover IT equipment with a serial number, with the specs, capacity of the server. It will give them a view of what's happening if you want to manage requests for change or incidents or planned maintenance. That is available in BMC. They can put a timeframe for maintenance, whenever you want to raise issues, it will tell you that there is client maintenance. And it prevents you from creating issues. This kind of automation is missing from Jira. Maybe I could find it if I added add-ons or patch in add-ons. Jira cannot compete with what is developed now in ServiceNow and BMC. They are focusing on having a full set of ITSM and a full set of ITOM, which is needed to enhance a lot in Jira. There are improvements in every release. They don't look at competitors. They focus more on enhancing bugs or enhancing the features that they have, to fix the bugs that they have, to listen to the users' recommendations. The other competitors are looking to enhance, to change entire the platform to make it reliable, or to make it also near for the growth of the company expectation. The IT team is looking for more automation, more link with systems. How they can, for example, prevent issues from happening. We want people to not slow down with the tickets. We want people to have the issue solved automatically. I know that there are add-ons, but always does not fit or is not always in the proper way that we are looking for.

At times you will need add-ons or additional software, so built-in features would be helpful. For example, a built-in SIEM. It would be interesting to add an Atlassian SIEM. I think it would be great!

JIRA Service Desk is really good when you have a primitive environment where most of the Atlassian applications are already present. However, if you are just using JIRA Service Desk for making leads for an IPS and solution, then it becomes really difficult to get all these IPS and capabilities up and running. This is due to the fact that in a native application, we don't get all these capabilities. JSD has some analytics, but it's pretty much basic and simple dashboards. There's no mobile application for JSD. It really would benefit from better implementation with other vendors. We're heavily reliant on some external marketplace applications. We don't find there's support for CMDB. The notifications are limited. That is good if a client environment is small enough and they do not require any advanced or mature use cases, but if they require it, then that's when we face a lot of issues because Jira Service Desk doesn't compliment such advanced decisions. Jira should offer package solutions and be much more focused on giving advanced capabilities. If they are not developing advanced capabilities, at least, what they can do is focus on providing a packaged solution to give their customers the flexibility to choose what type of business package they want - whether its operations based or finance related.

An improvement they could add is a better management dashboard. We only use the dashboard for the administration mode. We have a dashboard that reports the state of bugs or requirements. However, customers can only view requests that they made. We are not able to share a dashboard with our manager level customers to show them all of the requests in a quick dashboard. For Service Desk, I think the product now is very good and complete. Only the management dashboard for customers is a feature we would like to see in a future release. Maybe it is available already and we just can't find it.

Usability needs improvement. To configure it, you need to be well versed in JIRA administration. It's not very intuitive.

One of the issues is that this solution keeps changing within a short period. During the updates, when another version gets released, whatever I am tracking at that time gets lost and I have to type it all over again. Some enhancements can be done on the GANTT chart. It is not as user-friendly, and not easy to get established in JIRA. I would like to see the documents open in the same browser, and not need to download it each time. It is not easy to be established, it requires a lot of work to keep it up. In the next release, I would like to see more work in preferences. It would be great.

The solution should be more formalized. It could be more user-friendly. If we are talking about IT service management, I think more features related to problem management need to be within the solution. If you want something for supplier management or complication management, you have to buy some add-ons from the market to help you with this. However, there needs more enhancements regarding that both on the solution and with available add-ons. Arabic support is very important. It should be included on the solution itself, not provided separately. The reporting features should include more how-to guidance.

I think that JIRA Service Desk is a very good product and that it is full of features that work well to manage tasks. It has the flexibility to handle many different activities and it is very good at this. Especially in the latest version, it has some new features and capabilities that were added so that it is even better. The one thing I would like to see is better capabilities to integrate with products other than parts of the Atlassian system. For example, if there is a Microsoft product that is better for another team the integration may be difficult or impossible. Any one business process software can't do everything a system needs. For example, I have experience with JIRA and TFS (Team Foundation Server). TFS is a very good application and a good solution for software development teams. It's not the perfect solution for all parts of an organization and maybe does not fit an organization's needs well. In some cases, it may be better. It depends on the use. If you want a broad solution for your company, for task management, or issue tracking, TFS is not a good solution. For software development, TFS is very, very good and may be just what you need. After using the product and knowing the benefits of TFS, I thought that combining the systems would be the best solution: the combined system could help the company to decrease the time it took to process software issues. I think JIRA Service Desk does not have features that are as good for tracking fix times or bottlenecks in the process. You can use different plug-ins for JIRA Service Desk to add some functionality, but these plug-ins are very expensive. It would be nice if JIRA Service Desk added in some of these features for this type of support. But about the plugins, I found one plug-in — its name is Actionable Metric I think — and it is $3000. That is very expensive for users in Iran. For most customers, I would not be able to propose this solution because it's very expensive. But it is also very important to some of the projects I consult with. Because of that, it eliminates JIRA Service Desk from consideration, because we can't integrate them into the system.

I think the solution has a lack of capabilities from the user's perspective. I would, for example, be able to see all the phases instead of only being able to create a ticket. I want to be familiar with all the steps and be able to change things during these steps. I would like to see that improved. What's more, we wanted to be resellers for this program, but it was denied, unfortunately. The claim of the developers was that they didn't need other resellers or partners. I think they made a mistake because we work with a lot of customers. So I think that needs to be improved because we sell and we are business partners of IBM and Microsoft, for example. But with Atlassian, it's very, very hard.

Some of the areas that could be improved are with the customizations. For example, if I wanted to add a new user with the same name, or start a new bot, add a new caller, or even just want to add a new column, it is complicated. This area can be simplified. The foundation needs to be simplified. As an additional feature, I would like to see some permissions and definitions added or to allow us to add things such as a surname or additional rules in the work tools. Rules are needed for the configuration also, giving us access to writing the rules. JIRA protects the end-user, but for the configuration, more rules could be added to improve the workflow. The workflow could be more user-friendly.

One of the best additions to this product would be a single centralized point in which to store all the documents that are involved in progressing with tasks. For instance, if you're working on a JIRA task and you attach a document to it, not everybody will share a centralized storage facility where all the documents are. The idea would be to make it so everybody can see (or view) the same current document. They would get specific privileges (e.g., view or edit). But if a document is shared now, as it is in potentially an older version, it may not be accurate. Better to share the current document so that everyone has the same information. Centralized document storage would allow all documents to be linked to any issue where it was pertinent rather than having to be attached to specific issues and limiting the viewers.