Using Jira Software and Jira Service Management at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland

​Background

ICAS (The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland) is a professional body for more than 20,000 business professionals in the UK and around the world, and they are the world’s first professional body of chartered accountants. ICAS also have over 3,000 students training to become chartered accountants.

The Challenge

After successfully redesigning ICAS’ IT Service Desk, we were approached by ICAS to deliver two new projects:

1. to improve the way the digital delivery team manages their work, and
2. to implement a new service desk for the Education team.

For the first of these projects, we faced various challenges:

• we needed to improve visibility so that management could easily see what was happening in the business;
• existing reporting methods spanned disparate locations;
• existing processes needed to be streamlined and simplified across multiple Jira projects;
• there was no easy way to assess team capacity.

For the second initiative, our main challenge was to introduce new ways of working to a large team not yet familiar with Jira Service Management.

The Solution

We worked closely with both teams to plan, design, and implement simple, but complete solutions.

To solve the digital delivery team’s challenges, we:

• introduced a refined cross-product workflow for the digital delivery team, which reduced workload via workflow triggers. It did this by automatically transitioning an issue when an action was performed in a connected repository, e.g. a branch was created or a pull request was declined;
• set up a Jira project for each product that had its own roadmap and release schedule - this ensured that releases could be planned and tracked effectively;
• re-configured screens to collect the right types of information for each product throughout their lifecycle;
• set up multiple Kanban and Scrum boards, as well as release and cross-project boards to ensure the right levels of visibility;
• introduced shared dashboards for sharing relevant and important information to appropriate teams (e.g. management or project teams);
• provided a process blueprint which provided practical guidelines on how best to plan, track, and manage ongoing work.

For the new service desk for Education, we designed a brand new solution to meet the team’s needs. We:

• configured 10 unique request types to ensure that students could easily raise the right queries;
• created over 10 custom new fields to ensure the right information was captured at the right times;
• set up several queues to ensure that agents could manage requests effectively;
• implemented various automation rules for reducing manual overhead;
• provided training on best practices and how to use Jira Service Management to a group of brand new service desk agents!
  

Client: ICAS

Categories: IT Service Management

Technologies: Jira Software, Jira Service Management

"New Verve Consulting took the complexity out of setting up JIRA Atlassian tools and helped us get up and running quickly. Their flexible approach to working together meant we were able to solve problems as they arose and increased the amount of knowledge we retained internally. We can now continue to refine the way we are working with confidence."

- Jenna McLauchlan, Digital Delivery Manager