Microsoft 365 for Jira by Yasoon

During your space travels, whenever you locate a new planet or habitat, it’s a protocol that your firstline crew members be the ones to dip their feet and test the waters.

Only when they have verified that the grounds are safe and threat-free you and the rest of your desk-facing crew members can follow suit. Your firstline crew members are also the ones to run spaceship maintenance routines because they know the ship best.

In short, they are – as the name suggests – the first in line to deal with organizational operations as they are usually on the ground.

However, they are typically not as digitized as your other crew members on board as they have different work requirements and are accustomed to basic technology processes. Whether it’s in space or on earth, this circumstance remains.

Digitizing the Firstline Workforce Gebrüder Peters GmbH, a household name in the construction industry, was facing a similar dilemma. Founded in 1903, the company is a large-scale service provider for building services equipment: from single-family homes to large-scale public sector projects. It has long proven its expertise in electrical engineering, supply technology, solar technology, building management, steel construction, and CAD software solutions.

As Gebrüder Peters embraced the modern-day work environment, they realized the need to digitize their operations – even across the firstline workforce.

What they needed was an inhouse service desk to help facilitate cooperation across teams and hierarchies, which led them to leverage Jira Service Management (JSM) – one of the most proficient ITSM solutions in the market.

But here’s the thing, the environment that the firstline workers are in and the demanding working conditions mean that they don’t have the capacity to get acquainted with the ticketing systems or go through various screens just to communicate with the organization.

However, they have been using Microsoft 365 tools and relying on Office applications for on-site operations – which really works for them.

So, the issue here was that there are teams residing in JSM and teams residing in Microsoft, which of course, stunted integration efforts and resulted in silos.

Bridging the Silos between Two Worlds For any organization to be digitally empowered, they must first make sure that the processes are simplified enough to facilitate effective collaboration across teams.

In this case, Gebrüder Peters needed to find a way to simplify ticketing processes for firstline workers and service desk admins. More importantly, they needed capabilities that could make employees’ lives as easy as possible despite the use of two different platforms.

The company’s Digital Project Manager, Lisa Maria Creuso and Chief Digital Officer, Matthias Ortner began searching the market for solutions, but they already had a sound vendor choice in mind: yasoon. Both had experienced the effectiveness of yasoon’s integration tools in their previous respective companies and knew that the Atlassian vendor would be able to tailor a solution for Gebrüder Peters. They began rolling it out in 2020 and has since then evolved to leveraging a more fully featured solution: Microsoft 365 for Jira.

The Best of Both Worlds “yasoon’s solutions let our internal customers use any channel of their choice to open tickets.” - Matthias Ortner, Chief Digital Officer INTEGRATION 23 Below are some of the key capabilities that are enabled by the integration solution.

Direct Ticketing via Microsoft Teams Since the issue here was the accessibility of JSM by firstline workforce, Ortner decided that the best resolution would be to embed the service portal in Microsoft Teams. That way, firstliners will no longer need to remember a Jira URL or password. Every ticketing need can be found in Microsoft Teams, on any device, thanks to the Single-Sign-On feature. This eliminates waiting time, reduces the number of screens, and makes workers’ lives easier during on-site construction work.

The best part? Microsoft Teams users can directly open service tickets without waiting for a service agent.

Direct Ticketing via Microsoft Outlook Creuso and Ortner also integrated Outlook and JSM which was a strategic move because now, service agents can turn a standard email from firstline workers into a Jira ticket.

This eliminates errors when copy-pasting information and saves them a lot of time. A more prominent feature here is users can add a ticket specific comment from Outlook and mention colleagues directly in that comment, without having to add them in Jira.

Seamless Communication between Internal Customers and Service Agents Ortner also wanted to facilitate communication processes between Microsoft and JSM users. So, after a discussion with yasoon’s Tech Lead, to bias, the team developed a feature where users can start a conversation with the relevant stakeholders in a Microsoft Teams Channel/Chat directly from a Jira ticket.

This not only helps everyone stay on the same page, but it also enables effective communication across teams.

Individual Task Planning via Microsoftto Do Gebrüder Peters also integrated JSM with Microsoft to Do to help employees easily plan and manage their individual tasks. Users can now combine tasks from marked emails, Planner, their Jira Service Management tickets, and individual assignments.

This feature allows service agents to have a clear overview of all their tasks and better organize their work without having to switch back and forth between tools.

Surfing Through the Galaxy without Silos Mutual understanding of business needs was what allowed Gebrüder Peters and yasoon to unite all the teams across the organization successfully.

Currently, over 200 Gebrüder Peters GmbH employees use Microsoft 365 for Jira for their daily operations. The integrated system has also handled about 2,000 tickets since it was deployed, and efficiency has been the main currency for the company ever since.