Customer Story: Jira Workflow Toolbox

Customer Story: Jira Workflow Toolbox

Boosting Productivity Through Automation

Efficient onboarding is important - and no one wants the new hire spending their first days on the bridge twiddling their thumbs because they don’t have all the access they need yet. However, the processes under the hood often involve multiple departments dependent on each other's time-consuming manual tasks and are prone to data entry errors and inconsistencies.

This is a challenge shared by FES - Germany’s oldest political foundation. It promotes pluralistic social dialogue on the political challenges of the present day with research, events, and political education. This entails a high fluctuation of researchers, working students and academics requiring a robust and efficient onboarding process.

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Where It Began: Excel-Like Spreadsheet Without Business Logic

The starting point was an internally developed solution based on Oracle Forms, which could best be compared to a simple spreadsheet without any actual business logic.
This came with significant limitations, like missing a proper workflow, task assignment and ownership, proper field or process validation, notifications, etc.

"We knew that our onboarding process was simply no longer up to date," says Martin Herkenrath, IT Project Manager from FES. "We were looking for a solution that would allow us to standardize the process in-house and automate it as much as possible to avoid potential sources of mistakes."

Their search for a solution quickly led them to Jira, which already covered many of the aspects they were looking for, like an underlying workflow, assignment of responsibilities, or notifications of changes. However, while Jira offers some rudimentary options to extend workflows, these were not enough to automate the process as far as they wished. Therefore, they decided to use the Jira Workflow Toolbox, which offers almost unlimited possibilities for workflow automation with flexible conditions, validators and post-functions.

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But What Exactly Does the Solution Look Like?

In general, a new employee is represented by a Jira issue following a highly automated Jira workflow.
The first improvement was using JWT right at the issue creation to significantly improve data quality with several checks on the data points collected and entered by the HR department and creating a standardized summary based on that data.

The HR department then forwards the issue to the business department for further processing which is notified by e-mail. They enter all the relevant information - like which devices and accesses the new employee will need - and move the issue along. As the second big improvement, various issues are then automatically created for Facility Management, IT, and other departments based on the new issue information.

But that’s not all - some of these automated tasks are dependent on each other - e.g. most of the IT department's tasks first require the internal directory account name to be set. These dependencies are built into the workflow and the assignees of the dependent issues are notified when they can proceed. In addition, once all those additional issues have been completed, the initial onboarding issue they originated from is automatically completed.

All of these improvements - from data quality checks and improvements to automatic issue creation and dependency tracking were implemented with Jira Workflow Toolbox. Automating as many of the repetitive tasks as possible ensures that input mistakes are minimized, data consistency is guaranteed, and manual work is reduced to a minimum. Mapping a complex process like this would not have been possible without an additional automation tool in Jira.

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Extending Automation With Jira Workflow Toolbox

The feedback from management and users on using Jira with the Jira Workflow Toolbox has been consistently positive, and FES is impressed with the increased productivity in the registration process. This success has encouraged FES to bring even more other departments onto Jira and map other personnel and business processes such as master data changes with Jira Workflow Toolbox, utilizing the flexibility and high degree of automation to their advantage. Visit the marketplace to learn more about Jira Workflow Toolbox and start your free trial today.