WHITEPAPER Asset Management and Advanced Linking for Jira · 3 stagil.com Whitepaper: Asset Management and Advanced Linking for Jira 1. Introduction & Value Proposition 1.1. Asset

WHITEPAPER

Asset Management and Advanced Linking for Jira

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Whitepaper: Asset Management and Advanced Linking for Jira

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction & Value Proposition 3

1.1. Asset Management Use Cases 3

1.2. Asset Life cycle 4

1.3. Benefits of Asset Management 4

1.4. Asset Management in Incident, Service and Change Management (ITIL/ITSM) 5

1.5. Assets need Relations 5

2. Why Using Jira for Asset Management? 6

2.1. Reasons 6

2.2. The Missing Link in Jira 6

3. STAGIL Assets for Jira 8

3.1. Entity Relationship Model (ERM) 8

3.2. Managing Assets in Jira 9

3.3. Set Up Asset Workflows 11

3.4. Single Asset Relation Graph 12

3.5. Asset Search & Global Relation Graph 13

3.6. Asset Navigation 14

3.7. Advanced Asset Relation Analysis 16

3.8. Assets and Service Desk 17

3.9. 1-Click Setups 19

3.10. Asset Synchronizers 19

3.11. Integration With Other Apps 20

4. Conclusion 21

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1. Introduction & Value Proposition1.1. Asset Management Use Cases

Assets are a part of every company and may include a variety of objects and resources. Asset management or asset inventory management is the process of localizing, relating, maintaining, deploying, adapting, etc. a company’s tangible, intangible and also human assets. The holistic organization of all assets and resources is often referenced to as Enterprise Resource Management (ERP).

Abbr. Term Description

Hardware CMDB ITSM/ITIL/ITAM IT Asset & Inventory Management

Control all company hardware like servers, production machines, computers, telephones, printers, facilities and more with maintenance, updates, repairs, and replacements.

Software CMDB ITSM/ITIL Configuration Management - Software & Licenses

Visualize products, modules, versions, licenses, and releases - manage their dependencies in a structured workflow.

CRM Customer Relationship Management

Manage customers and partners including their contacts - optimize the lead processes, organize account management and gain market insights.

HR Human Resource Management Organize employees and their contracts including hierarchies, salaries, vacation, and overtime - integrate with Tempo Timesheets.

PM Project Management Track projects, portfolios, and milestones with advanced data and reports such as timeline and budget traffic lights - integrate with BigPicture, Structure or Jira Portfolio.

GRC & AUD Risk, Governance, Compliance, Audit and Process Management

Document your company’s processes - organize audits, identify risks, findings and track measures and compliance.

WHS Warehouse List your company’s warehouse, manage deposits, withdrawals and replacements and track stock volume.

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1.2. Asset Life cycle

In general, asset management is not just a matter of tracking assets. It’s a matter of managing them throughout their whole life cycle to ensure they don’t fall off the radar and begin to deteriorate. Discover, normalize, and reclaim your assets to avoid the mentioned risks.

1.3. Benefits of Asset Management

Especially when you start to scale, a solid and streamlined process to track and manage all your hardware, software, virtual, and non-IT assets in one place becomes crucial. That’s why this topic needs to be considered right from the beginning. It becomes clear, that asset management is more than just choosing the best software, devices, and staff for your company. Asset Management is an investment that provides substantial and measurable benefits for short, medium, and long-term needs and goals:

ཞ Increased control over assets

ཞ Increased efficiency in project management and development

ཞ Better communication and understanding between IT and other business units

ཞ Better customer service through streamlined data availability

ཞ Cost reduction of assets through consistent reviews

ཞ Better data security

ཞ Reduced downtime and outages

ཞ Reduced governance risks from statutory requirements

ཞ Increased support for security and disaster recovery readiness

ཞ Improved budgeting and other strategic decision-making processes

ཞ Transparency and vision over all assets

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Asset management in Jira allows business, software & service teams to gain a structured and connected approach in order to maintain the overview and find the right asset in the right place to work on. It further enables real-time, shared access for permanent updating. The benefit of successful asset management lies in the huge time savings by stopping endless searching and employees’ investments for locating and gathering information. Quick and complete visibility means faster resolution of (internal and external) customer issues.

1.4. Asset Management in Incident, Service and Change Manage-ment (ITIL/ITSM)

Asset management also impacts other ITIL processes such as incident management. Here, asset management provides key diagnostic information about assets used by the requester. It also helps technicians with faster access to workstations via remote control to firefight issues. In problem management, asset management provides diagnostic information to perform root cause analyses. In change management, asset management helps carry out IT changes with minimal risk, downtime, and impact. It also lets you understand the impact of planned changes to the IT infrastructure in advance.

1.5. Assets need Relations

To gain most of your asset management you need to manage not only the list of assets with their attributes but especially also the interwoven dependencies and relations between your company’s assets. The business logic of this link network is designed in Entity Relationship Models (ERM) such as the following:

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2. Why Using Jira for Asset Management?With Jira, all assets and related issues are stored in one place. The flexible configuration allows a team to organize crucial information in a beneficial way for their operations.

2.1. Reasons

Jira’s native features provide an out-of-the-box solution for a powerful asset management platform:

Requirement Jira

Custom Types

Custom Fields

Custom Screens

Custom Workflows

Custom Notifications

Custom Permissions

Powerful Search

In-App Communication

Powerful Reports

CSV Import

History / Change log

Mobile access

Advanced Linking

Link Visualization

Link Attributes

Link Analysis

Link Search

Powerful Exports

Custom Integrations

Custom Automation

Network Discovery Synchronization

2.2. The Missing Link in Jira

Jira offers an easy and simple issue linking functionality. In order to manage advanced relations between issues and assets or other objects it lacks the following functionalities:

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Ћ Option to restrict available link types.

Ћ Option to restrict selectable issues for linking.

Ћ Option to restrict the number of selectable links.

Ћ Option to adjust the display style of links.

Ћ Option to create an advanced dynamic logic between linked objects.

Ћ Option to perform advanced searches throughout the link network.

Ћ Option to visualize the link network and the link hierarchy.

These weaknesses are addressed by STAGIL Assets for Jira. STAGIL Assets for Jira allows you to map the complexity of relations between assets and issues in a simple way by leveraging the native Jira links and enhancing them with a powerful logic on both sides of the links:

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3. STAGIL Assets for JiraJira Software in combination with STAGIL Assets allows you to e.g.:

3.1. Entity Relationship Model (ERM)

STAGIL Assets allows you to build entity relationship models in Jira by defining the exact relation types between your issue and asset types.

Asset relations are based on default Jira links which are managed via advanced relation custom fields.

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3.2. Managing Assets in Jira

The following Jira asset displays the space shuttle “Death Orb II” with its

ཞ Attributes & Status

ཞ Celestial Body / Location

ཞ Equipped Weapons

ཞ Avatar

ཞ QR Code

ཞ Health status as traffic light (calculated based on relations network)

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Jira already comes with a couple of predefined system fields. They include summary, assignee, reporter, labels, creation date, last updated date and the resolution by default. On top of that, you can add your own custom fields to each asset type.

They can be created for each issue type and allow an organization to track the relevant information:

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3.3. Set Up Asset Workflows

At this point, you can enter and locate your assets in Jira and manage their relations. Now, let’s take a look at workflows. A workflow is all about making users stick to a defined process for your assets’ life-cycles. The procurement of assets differs between small companies and large enterprises. Some high-ranked soldiers may donate old space shuttles while rebel fighters, in general, may use a third-party recycling service or the Milky Way Empire may mostly conquer new assets. Jira allows you to define the workflows that reflect your organization’s processes, no matter how complicated they are.

This is how the workflow of our space shuttle looks like. It also takes into consideration that the space shuttle might have been conquered by the Milky Way Empire or eliminated in a battle.

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3.4. Single Asset Relation Graph

The relations of any asset can be displayed as a network or hierarchy graph. The graph allows you to navigate through the link network and to directly work on selected assets or issues. Hierarchy Graph With Sidebar

Network Graph With Sidebar

The relation graphs of single assets or issues can also be displayed directly in an asset or issue and can be used for navigating:

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3.5. Asset Search & Global Relation Graph

STAGIL Assets for Jira allows you to perform searches in the link network using following JQL:

issue in relation (“JQL to start the search from”, “Link types or directions to

use for search”, “Number of levels for search”)

The following search returns all weapons equipped to the “Death Orb 2”:

Search results and their relations can be display across Jira projects in a global link graph:

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3.6. Asset Navigation

STAGIL Assets provides a custom asset navigation integrated into the issue navigator.

It also allows you to manage custom navigation items in your project sidebar:

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In order to find the assets more quickly, the entire navigation can be individually adapted with the help of STAGIL Navigation:

• Completely configure the top navigation bar to your needs.

• Hide the Jira system and apps menus.

• Create your own menus with links to Jira issues and projects, Confluence pages or external web pages, separators to enhance the menus visually, dynamic custom project lists, and two menu levels.

• Create different menus for each of your Jira user groups.

• Follow your corporate identity guidelines or simply improve the appearance of Jira by adding a custom image on top of the navigation bar as a header.

• Adjust the Jira footer to your needs. Remove the information about your Jira version and add helpful links for your Jira users, add another image, and more.

• Manage the panels on your Jira issue screens. Expand or collapse the available panels or completely hide them from your view screens. Choose different panel settings per project, issue type, and user group.

To edit the menu, go to the Top Navigation configuration of the Jira apps administration. When creating a new menu item for your top navigation bar, you can choose the above mentioned options.

Similarly, the navigation of Confluence can be adjusted to ensure a uniform appearance within the galaxy:

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3.7. Advanced Asset Relation Analysis

Asset Traffic Lights

Asset Lookup Fields

Asset Dashboards and Reports Monitoring your assets with dashboards is one of the many ways to leverage the data of your inventory. You may ask following questions which can be easily answered in real-time with different filters aggregated to a dashboard:

1. How many laser sabers do we have in stock?

2. How many space shuttles are currently being used?

3. Which assets show a critical status?

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As your organization grows, Jira continues to organize your data in a scalable way. Combined with Jira Service Desk, your support services and assets are connected in one place.

3.8. Assets and Service Desk

IT Asset Management influences several other ITIL processes which can be transferred into Jira service desk via issue types:

• Service management: Key service information about newly requested assets can be connected with existing (outdated) assets.

• Incident management: Key diagnostic information about the assets used by the requester are instantly available. This helps technicians to troubleshoot issues.

• Problem management: Diagnostic information to perform root cause analyses can be directly linked to the problem tickets and the RCA meeting minutes in Confluence.

• Change management: Carry out IT changes with minimal risk, downtime, and impact. It also lets you understand the impact of planned changes on IT, beforehand.

That way, different scenarios can be added to the customer portal with respect to the individual issue types:

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Here, the request screens can be enriched with further relations as well, which enables the correct assignment to the right asset:

Your assets can be also displayed in the queue with the asset field as an extra column:

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3.9. 1-Click Setups

To provide a quick start for a new Jira instance and to also get familiar with STAGIL Assets - Advanced Links, you can use several 1-click setups which are basically predefined projects with all necessary configurations of issue types, workflows, screens, schemes, and relations. All 1-click setups are filled with sample data to demonstrate possible use cases.

To install a 1-click setup follow these steps:

1. Apps

2. STAGIL Assets and CRM

3. 1-Click setup and click on your preferred setup. You can choose between two options:

• If you want to create a predefined project, choose one of the setups that fits your use case, for example CMDB, CRM or HR.

• If you want to create predefined issue types incl. issue type icons without a project, click on Generate Icon Library.

3.10. Asset Synchronizers

STAGIL Assets allows you to synchronize your assets in Jira with various external and Jira internal data sources, such as

1. Any SQL database

2. Any SQL based discovery solution

3. Jira users/user accounts (used for HR and service desk-connected CRM)

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4. Jira software versions (used for software CMDB, configuration management and release management)

5. Jira projects (used for software CMDB and project management)

6. LDAP servers/AD/user directories (coming soon)

3.11. Integration With Other Apps

STAGIL Assets integrates well with automation, search and export-apps such as

1. Power Scripts

2. Script Runner

3. Jira Automation

4. Xporter

5. eazyBi

6. Temo Timesheets

7. JQL Tricks

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4. ConclusionAsset Management is crucial for adding transparency and control to an organization’s CMDB, CRM, HR, PM, GRC, AUD, and WHS management. Jira already allows to store relevant assets in one place and to link them with connected issues.

Extending it with STAGIL Assets empowers organizations to manage assets in their full complexity by

• Restricting selectable issues for linking.

• Restricting the number of selectable links.

• Adjusting the display style of links.

• Creating an advanced dynamic logic between linked objects.

• Performing advanced searches through the link network.

• Visualizing the link network and the link hierarchy.

• Navigating through the customized asset hierarchy.

• Managing avatars and QR codes.

For a complete overview, visit the Atlassian Marketplace.

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=stagil

Documents

WHITEPAPER Asset Management and Advanced Linking for Jira · 3 stagil.com Whitepaper: Asset Management and Advanced Linking for Jira 1. Introduction & Value Proposition 1.1. Asset