Can I use standard Jira for asset management? Yes, you can.

Assets, in general, are more and more a fundamental piece of any organisation. And the organisation increasingly needs to have a perfect overview, as this is the only way it can provide its services optimally. So more and more asset management must become the number one priority of any company.

When we think of the assets in our company, we tend to visualise only those things we use in our daily work, such as laptops, cars, etc. Indeed this is true, but an asset is more than that. As we just said, an asset can be a laptop but might also be a patent, a customer, an employee; and in the end, it can be anything that has value and a profile of its own.

A common problem is how organisations manage their assets. Different areas have different ways of registering and following these assets, which becomes a problem when we need a holistic view of them.

With the fast-growing rate of business and the different locations, the asset acquiring process has become more agile than ever and, therefore, harder to control. Sometimes we might ask ourselves if we know how many assets our company currently has, whom they are assigned to, and even how old they are. These are just some possible questions.

This lack of vision brings uncertainty when the organisation needs to face a new challenge. The challenges could be a new project, where it is not clear what assets are available, or when a company doesn’t know when it is the right time to replace an asset or even its current status.

If there is a chronic problem with a particular asset, how might it affect the remaining assets in our organisation, and how does that potential risk affect operations?

These are not new problems at all, just problems growing and gaining more visibility in most organisations.

Some organisations already work with Jira Service Management (JSM) for helpdesk purposes with the Insight add-on. Atlassian uses Insight (a previous stand-alone add-on that can now be embedded into Jira Service Management Premium) that helps successfully achieve this management goal.

But this blog post is not about organisations using Atlassian’s Insight; instead, it is about asset management that uses the native potential of Jira combined with the helpdesk potential of Jira Service Management. Because sometimes “less is more”, and I might not need such a powerful tool as Insight for my asset management.

So, our challenge was to approach asset management with out-of-box Atlassian features, and we went for it!

We tried to use Jira Service Management, which had some requests already oriented towards asset management, such as requesting a new laptop, requesting technical assistance, etc., but that until now didn’t have any direct relation with an asset figure in the system. The asset specifications and status were registered outside Jira and Jira Service Management in external files, such as Excel. This asset figure now on Jira is an object that allows us to register all the technical details on the asset, such as brand name, serial number and many other specifications.

So we created a specific project in Jira that we connected to the Jira Service Management helpdesk project. When we submit a request on the asset, a new relationship initiates.

For example, when a JSM request for a new laptop is submitted, the asset in Jira that already exists needs to be related to this new request. In this way, we can follow the request workflow for the assignment of this asset (as though it were already possible) and at the same time follow the workflow for this specific asset as it passes through phases like “desktop preparing”, “delivery”, etc.

It’s possible even to bring a new dimension to your information by adding a layer of “employee” information. We can get reports on all the assets belonging to a specific “employee” with specific filtering. Of course, there is probably concern over how we insert or update existing assets (using this setup) on the system, but we can always rely on the native import features or the API for this purpose.

If we have the correct configuration of products, projects, and assets and add the correct relation patterns, we can achieve simple asset management natively.

We can then operate filters and dashboards for this data to retrieve insights into our assets. The filters can be of great use not just as search tools for assets based on specific fields or workflow status but mainly as a base for our Dashboards.

In the end, we can rely on the dashboards Jira offers us to dice and slice the information a bit and get statistic reports on the existing assets by type, employee, expiry date, stage, cost, etc. These are just a few examples.

So as we can see, regarding assets, with this approach, we can quickly and efficiently know everything we have “in-house” and how can we manage them!

Feel free to contact us to discuss how we can improve your Jira and give it new potential.