Service Desk Waterfall
  • Article
  • Mar.15.2023

How to deploy a service desk in a Waterfall-friendly way ​​

  • Mar.15.2023
  • Reading time mins

Process not product

Jira Service Management is the most flexible, scalable ITSM or ESM platform out there. We’re sure of it. Many organisations arrive at a similar conclusion then hesitate about initiating a project to implement it. There is a common assumption that any Atlassian Partner like Valiantys, will be all in with Agile ways of working. We are, but we are also enterprise-grade consultants from corporate backgrounds. We recognise that organisations often need help with the process of planning and implementation and here’s how we bridge the gap between more traditional programme office structures and an agile style project delivery.​

Where Waterfall meets Agile

Milestones, RAID analysis, RAG status: agile may have its own risk and status reporting mechanisms, but the information is the same, as is the logic behind it. When we plan projects with global enterprises, there is often a parallel universe of board level reporting styles and development team ways of working. Some agile elements of agile and scrum techniques are often in place or small teams work independently in an agile way, while the rest of the organization follows a project management approach, often led by the digital transformation programme office.  ​​

Our solution is a Waterfall style project design, where the start, finish and reporting conform to the customer’s standard conventions, and then everything in between is run in an agile way, with a steady cadence, regular iterative loops and a fairly rapid and efficient process of planning, testing and refining before the launch.  ​

Matching your pace

The beauty of sandwiching agile in the middle of the Waterfall approach is that we can move fast or slow as dictated by the project’s governing team. The speed and scale of projects we support falls within a very wide range. From spinning up a service desk from scratch in 2 weeks, then rolling it out across the organisation over months, to designing slowly and rolling out in a risk-mitigated, phased approach team by team or region by region, often adding language capabilities and workflows as we go.​

Gradual and phased

Larger, more complex organizations, no matter the size or reach of their service desks can work with us over several months of elapsed time to plan a project in detail. Likewise, the rollout may be staged, with different stakeholder or user groups being onboarded at intervals. This has a number of benefits, chief amongst which is the time to prepare and work through common FAQs, workflows and scenarios and train service desk teams thoroughly before go-live.  ​

Budget-conscious

Several charitable organisations we have worked with have a user base that is partly comprised of volunteers who are non-technical. In such cases, we focus our time on creating an extremely user-friendly experience with dynamic forms and simple workflows. The documentation is concise and intelligible and we spread our project input over several months, as opposed to a short and intense burst of activity.

Global, at pace

The surge in uptake of cloud based versions of products like Jira, Confluence and, of course, Jira Service Management, has given rise to a situation in which meeting hard deadlines is the highest priority. Migration to Atlassian Cloud provides an opportunity for consolidation of instances and rationalisation of add-on applications. When planning starts, the expiry date for one application can determine the go-live date everything else.​

Jira Service Management has a key role to play in these situations. Service Desks are there to help users and IT Ops teams ensure business continuity and user uptake for all affected applications. It acts as the seat belt for those driving the project.​

Our teams are able to keep pace and roll out a service desk in one hit or in quick successive phases to a global user base of well over 10,000 users.  ​

Fast or slow, we can keep pace with project and support organizations bridge the gap between the reporting or project management style they are familiar with and the new opportunities afforded by the Atlassian family of applications.​

If you are ready to move fast – you could enjoy 30% off your licence fee for year 1 of a three year term for Jira Service Management. 

> Learn more

 

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