Jira Service Management promises to unlock high-velocity teams. And both technical teams and the business departments they work with can benefit from Jira Service Management, especially HR teams.
Atlassian’s People Technology IT team partners with the People Team (which is what we call our HR department) to find creative ways to unlock speed and value. Paul Biagio, a senior IT manager at Atlassian, is at the center of our recent planning and development initiatives using Jira Service Management to improve HR services. Paul and his team have discovered some impactful and creative ways to improve onboarding by automating workflows for new employees.
“Jira Service Management is a vital piece of the solution for a couple reasons,” Paul says. “First, it bridges the gap between several teams and HR platforms, including Workday. This allows us to better track and support all the different employee and People Team tasks from one place. It also gives us better data to measure our end-to-end performance.”
The need for a better onboarding process
We’re particularly interested in improving onboarding processes at Atlassian because the company has grown at an unprecedented rate – and shows no signs of slowing down. Supporting this growth through automation and efficiency can save money and enables us to:
- Increase the bandwidth of our HR team
- Save time and money by making workflows simpler and speedier
- Add workflow measurability to improve oversight and process
- Create an intuitive and enjoyable experience for employees that use the system
The surge in workforce growth at Atlassian is even more unique given that it accelerated around the same time COVID lockdown measures went into effect worldwide. In fact, about 40 percent of current employees began work during that time, and many have still never seen the inside of an Atlassian office. Our efforts to empower our distributed-first workforce create a better onboarding process to facilitate a lot of new, distributed hires.
Why we chose Jira Service Management
It was easy to choose Jira Service Management for this project given it had many steps that could easily be automated and streamlined. Jira Service Management, a leading-class tool for ITSM enables request management, problem management, and configuration management, among other capabilities. It’s also easy to integrate with other platforms and software tools, thanks to its built-in templates and APIs.
The benefit of Jira Service Management is that it’s not pretending to be a Human Resource Information System (HRIS). The benefit is that it can unlock new value by automating data from an industry-leading HRIS.
Paul Biagio, Senior IT Manager
How Jira Service Management facilitates onboarding
Workday is our HRIS – our one source for people-related data. We knew we could create more efficiency by feeding data from our HRIS into Jira, empowering us to use the information to drive decisions and actions. To create this connection between Jira and our HRIS, we turned to a third-party automation platform – Workato.
“Workato is the glue that binds Workday together with Jira,” Paul says. “Now, when we hire someone and add them to Workday, that action automatically creates a ticket in Jira Service Management through a Workato recipe.”
Once that ticket is created, Workday initiates a catalog of requests from the onboarding checklist that our People Team follows, including laptop and account provisioning, accessory requests, and orientation scheduling. Many of these tasks aren’t built-in HRIS functions, but when we use Jira Service Management and Workato to automate the process, these tasks are set to start as soon as another one finishes, or even simultaneously. Simply put, Jira Service Management makes onboarding tasks significantly easier to manage.
Using the Workato integration between Workday and Jira Service Management allows us to bridge segmented teams and reduce the time taken to complete a task (and by extension, company-wide costs). The process makes the whole catalog of onboarding tasks centrally trackable and measurable by how quickly the tasks are completed.
“By having Jira Service Management onboarding tasks landing in the onboarding ops team queue, we reduced a risk of human error and eliminated a lot of manual effort,” says Andi Breslin, Head of People Operations at Atlassian. “It not only added value to our talent acquisition team and new hires by speeding up the onboarding process, but it also added capacity to our onboarding ops team.”
How Jira Service Management manages cases efficiently
We built a front-end portal and logged Jira Service Management cases for every transaction that needed action from the People Team, starting with critical, high-volume transactions. These cases can be assigned to the right People Team member in the applicable geographical area with appropriate Service Level Agreements (SLAs) – a small but key detail, as each area helps with geo-specific regulations, laws, offerings, and HR policies.
More importantly, tracking this kind of data can allow the team to move closer to operations because it supports intelligent decision-making.
What we learned and next steps
Atlassian took a powerful HRIS tool and made it even better with Jira Service Management. And the implementation is straightforward thanks to Workato’s easy integration and Jira Service Management’s built-in templates and API.
“We launched a new capability for our HR-related onboarding transactions,” Paul says. “Now we plan to continue building towards the vision of using Jira Service Management to improve all business-critical transactions, such as transfers, terminations, address changes, and many more.”
For our Atlassian ITSM team, Jira Service Management is the bridge between separate teams and a capable tool for filling the feature gaps in a wide range of business platforms. These factors influenced the team to unlock further business value with Lever, an applicant tracking system.
“I wouldn’t be too surprised if the entire employee lifecycle – from recruitment to their first day to annual activities like performance reviews, up until literally their last day – is touched by Jira Service Management in the future,” Paul says. “The opportunities are endless and the value is there.”
If your HR team wants to improve its onboarding process, Jira Service Management could be the golden ticket. Want to find out? Sign up for a demo or try it for free.