How one legal team stopped their Jira to Excel updates to focus on getting work done
Written by Rina Nir
Company
A leading Learning Management System provider
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The legal team at a leading Learning Management System provider, could not afford to be the roadblock to a well-oiled sales operation. But with just three people serving 200 account and sales managers, this was a big ask. It was clear that their convoluted process, which required a manual update from Jira to Excel, was getting in everyone’s way.
Find out how they harnessed the power of Snapshots to automate the process and effortlessly keep everyone in sync.
Moving into Jira Service Management and Confluence
The legal department needed to squeeze all the efficiency potential from their systems.
Paralegal Naomi (her real name is with us) rose to the challenge and moved their task list into a Jira Service Management (JSM) project. This first step helped the team members track their work, ensure nothing was neglected, and stay focused on the right tasks. It also provided a friendly way for the teams’ internal customers to submit requests for help.
Initially, the queue status in JSM was also kept in a separate Excel spreadsheet. Through the spreadsheet, managers of the sales and account teams could keep up to date with the status of their tasks. Naomi recalls that “it was a really clunky process and honestly didn’t really work very well.” Given the number of concurrent tasks managed by the legal team, this was extremely hard to maintain. It was also too risky to give everyone access to the Excel files, so managers needed to update their teams about the status of tickets, causing even more time to be wasted.
Moving away from their Jira to Excel inefficiency
To move away from their Jira to Excel conundrum, Naomi turned to Confluence.
“I was excited about it,” said Naomi. “I really dove in, creating a Confluence page that linked to our service desk and explained how people would submit a ticket. And then we embedded our JSM queue within that.”
Using the native Confluence macro, Jira Work Items, the queue was now embedded in Confluence, and they thought they’d found a great solution.
But quickly, she encountered a problem…
“We mainly work with our account managers and sales team,” she explained. “The queue shows the various legal issues and what needs to be prioritized. For instance, if there’s a sale waiting to happen and legal needs to be involved, that issue would be a higher priority than something else. However, a lot of our sales and account managers didn’t have a Jira license. So they could access the Confluence page but weren’t able to see our embedded queue.”
So Naomi turned to the Atlassian Marketplace in search of a better solution. She asked the site admin to install Snapshots and went ahead and tried it out. From there, it was quick to create a snapshot for the JSM queue. Now, anyone with access to Confluence could see the queue.
How to configure a snapshot for a legal service desk?
Inspired by Naomi’s story, we have created a legal service desk example in our sandbox site to help you get away from Jira to Excel updates. We’ve created a knowledge base space and a page with the queue, similar to what Naomi did.
The JSM setup was straightforward. We used the legal service desk template provided by Atlassian. The only modification was to replace the free-text Department field with a single-select Department field. We prefer to use select fields over text whenever possible—it helps standardize the data and reports.
Check out how we recreated this snapshot on this page.
How we configured the snapshot:
- The JQL search criteria is:
- project=legalsd and (resolution!=unresolved OR updated>=-14d) ORDER by RANK DESC
- We selected all the fields we wanted to expose, and used the ‘group’ option on Department field (see screenshot).
- In the Layout tab, under ‘Grouping default’, we ticked ‘Expand all’. This means that the default view for Snapshot, expand all the Department subsections (see screenshot).
Lastly, we want to keep the snapshot up to date automatically. To achieve this, we used Snapshots’ automation endpoint and connected it to a Jira automation rule.
The automation rule triggers each time a new request is submitted. Because the legal desk receives frequent requests, this is regularly enough for most purposes. Any other update events could be linked as well if required.
Snapshots save time and boost visibility
Naomi replaced a Jira to Excel spreadsheet method with an automated snapshot. This has eliminated a long-winded manual process across multiple teams, which has had a huge impact on the business.
Two months since implementation, feedback has been good.
“Everybody has access to Confluence,” explained Naomi. “So we post the queue there. And it’s worked out really nicely. Mainly, people want to keep on top of where issues are and who they’re assigned to, and who they can communicate with. It works for everyone and does what they need.”
Naomi explained, “Using Excel also had a limited scope of visibility. Because you can’t have 30 people on an Excel spreadsheet – that would get crazy. We needed to limit access to the Excel file to managers and the legal team. We share the snapshots with a much wider audience without risk. Now managers no longer need to constantly keep them updated on their issues because they can go and look for themselves.”
A life-changing power-up
The small size of the legal department in comparison with the number of work items it has to deal with means that using smart tools like JSM and Snapshots and automation is key.
“It’s been life changing,” said Naomi. “We resolved 302 issues in the last 25 days. We need to have a lot of this automated so that we can actually focus on the things we really need to be doing.”
Are you burdened by a Jira to Excel flow?
If you want to share your Jira data in Confluence with unlicensed stakeholders, Snapshots can help. Download the app here(link), eliminate clunky processes, and streamline information sharing.
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