What does it take to turn ITSM from red tape into real teamwork - with a little help from Jira?
- Christine Box
- Sep 22
- 4 min read
TL;DR:
Adopting Atlassian ITSM with an agile, team-centric mindset necessitates cultural and practical shifts. Embracing openness, collaboration, and continuous improvement, supported by automation, integrated practices, and modern tools, allows organisations to deliver value more quickly, enhance customer and employee experiences, increase resilience, and align more closely with business goals. IT transitions from a bottleneck to a strategic enabler of growth. All with a touch of breakfast commentary.
Let's talk ITSM in the mindset of culture and pragmatism
To fully embrace an agile, team-centric approach to ITSM, organisations must commit to some fairly hefty cultural and practical shifts. Think ITIL 4 meets Agile and DevOps: collaboration, transparency, and the courage to continuously improve (without collapsing into endless process theatre). In the thinking below, we will focus on the theoretical and wider aspects of ITSM; no definition of Incident and Change will be mentioned!
Cultural Shifts
Let’s not beat around the bush - culture eats process for breakfast (with Chai seeds on top). To build resilience and agility, organisations need to step up with:
Openness and Transparency: Atlassian’s “open work” ethos means no more silos - IT, Ops, Dev, and business teams sharing context openly. It accelerates decisions and builds trust (and frankly, trust is cheaper than bureaucracy). Of course, where needed, security settings can give safety to Infosec who may love/need openness except when confidentiality is required.
Collaboration, not Command-and-Control: Swap hierarchy for high cooperation. Cross-functional teams, open comms, fewer fiefdoms (because we all like a good medieval term to add clarity). Simple, but not easy. Consider using Spotify with a mix of Squads, Tribes, and Chapters.
Value-First Thinking: Less obsession with internal KPIs, more alignment to customer and business outcomes through OKRs. Measure what matters, not just what’s measurable. Where ‘why’ is both the King and the Queen!
Learning from Failure: Blameless post-mortems aren’t about being nice - they’re about extracting lessons that fuel innovation and resilience. This is quite tough, having a group who understands it's about learning and not blame. However, when mistakes do happen, it takes delicate leadership, and in some cases, Scrummaster end-level big boss vibe when dealing with external clients integrated into teams!
Knowledge as a Shared Asset: Reward sharing. Move knowledge out of silos and into shared spaces where teams can actually use it. But remember when creating it, you will need to maintain it! Less does not always mean more, but sometimes more is just noise that needs to be maintained (and this becomes critical if you use AI)!
Adaptability: Shift from rigid, rules-driven structures to flexible, performance-oriented teams that thrive on change instead of fearing it, but don't run amok with the goals or strategy. Change is inevitable; leaning into it is essential, but change for the sake of change can be demotivating.
Practical Shifts
Cultural change alone won’t cut it. The real magic happens when practices and tools reinforce the right behaviours:
Holistic ITIL 4 Practices: Move away from rigid processes and instead apply guiding principles like “Start where you are” and “Progress iteratively.” Pragmatism over dogma.
Agile Ways of Working:
Deliver iteratively with MVPs.
Use Kanban boards in Jira or Trello for visibility.
Keep meetings short and purposeful - daily stand-ups, not endless status marathons.
Continuous Improvement: Regular retrospectives (hello Atlassian Team Playbook) to keep sharpening the saw.
Shift Left in Service Delivery: Self-service through Jira Service Management and Confluence - deflecting tickets so agents focus on the tricky stuff.
Automation Everywhere:
Smart Jira Service Management workflows to cut out drudge work.
JSM Operations (was Opsgenie) for on-call scheduling without burnout.
Atlassian Intelligence to draft, summarise, and generally lighten the load.
Incident Management, Modernised: Runbooks in Confluence, ChatOps for real-time response, Opsgenie + Statuspage for comms. Less chaos, faster recovery.
Lean Change Control: Automate approvals for low-risk changes, integrate with CI/CD pipelines, and keep CABs only where they actually add value.
Integrated Dev + Ops: Shared goals, shared tools, shared accountability. A faster path to delivery and recovery.
Knowledge Management Done Right: Confluence as the single source of truth - FAQs, docs, PIRs - all peer-reviewed and searchable.
Assets and Config Done Smarter: Lean service models in Jira Service Management Assets, supported by automation for accuracy and insight.
Team Playbook in Action: Apply Atlassian’s tried-and-tested “plays” to strengthen collaboration, improve decision-making, and keep teams healthy.
The Payoff (the All-day breakfast!)
When organisations embed these cultural and practical shifts, ITSM stops being the department of “no” and starts becoming a genuine driver of business value. The results are not just faster ticket resolution times, but measurable impact across the board:
The Eggs: Accelerated Time to Value: Streamlined practices and automation mean teams can deliver new services, releases, and fixes at pace - without compromising on quality. Faster delivery equals faster realisation of business outcomes.
The Bacon: Enhanced Customer & Employee Experience: A culture of openness, self-service, and proactive incident management reduces friction for both end-users and internal teams. Customers see value quicker, and employees feel empowered rather than bogged down.
The Sausages: Resilience at Scale: With modern incident management, adaptive change control, and blameless learning loops, organisations don’t just respond to disruptions - they bounce forward from them. This builds confidence across the business.
The Beans: Stronger Alignment to Business Goals: By adopting value-first OKRs and integrated workflows, IT moves from being seen as a cost centre to a strategic partner, with demonstrable alignment to revenue, growth, and customer satisfaction.
The Hash Brown (I know - controversial): Reduced Risk, Increased Trust: Automation, transparent change approvals, and integrated knowledge sharing reduce errors, ensure auditability, and build trust across stakeholders - from the boardroom to the service desk.
The Toast: Sustainable Efficiency Gains: Eliminating low-value busywork through automation and Atlassian Intelligence frees talent to focus on higher-order problem solving, innovation, and delivering differentiating capabilities.