With the introduction of Jira, all users received their associated usernames and passwords via SMS, eliminating non-management level notifications and issues. Jira received all reports, and the L1 team took up the issues of accredited users directly via the call center using the ticketing system. Problems that could not be solved at the L1 level were then escalated to L2. The L2 team was notified by email and worked on the issues raised.

On an average day, Jira received 100-150 reports, which meant that the management had first-level feedback on which situations needed immediate intervention. The hotline, designed to address the problems of accredited users, was a great help regarding response time.

Reporting

The company was able to easily fulfill its contractual reporting obligations with the use of Jira, as the company's dashboard continuously displayed reports for the day, which were reported to the organizers together with the day's specific incidents.

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Stormy start

On the night of 7 August, before the Masters competitions had even started, a large storm hit Budapest, with lightning striking a tree just a few meters from the Alfred Hajos National Aquatics Complex. It ran right through the low-voltage power grid, knocking out four switches and all the cameras. The low-voltage L2 support team replaced the switches and devices the next morning so that everything worked perfectly by the time the races started.

Growing spectator numbers

Of course, the swimming events attracted the most spectators during the World Championships, which began on 23 July in the swimming pool at Dagály. At this time, there was an incredible peak in the number of journalists and other accredited visitors coming to the competition, which was perfectly demonstrated in Jira's report.

The distribution between locations

Of the venues, the Danube Arena naturally took the main prize for the number of reports. There was also a tremendous amount of reports made from the InterContinental Hotel, as they were constantly holding conferences for 200-300 people, and these had to be supported from the venue. Printing was by far the leading type of error, and Level 1s were also required to enter paper replacement and jamming issues into the system.

LED and TV issues

When the operations organization was set up, the broadcast and transmission teams were completely separate groups, so this set-up was also used for the audio-video team, who were primarily responsible for the LED walls and TVs. Despite this setup, L1 still received continuous error reports for LED walls. On the advice of META-INF, the L2 AB team was set up with change management within Jira and integrated into the system on the fly and all LED wall-related errors were routed to them, which meant that this problem was also eliminated.

World Aquatics Championships from the META-INF perspective

Speed was vital throughout the event. To facilitate the process, one-pagers were created for all L0, L1, L2 and L3 teams – reviewing these documents was enough to ensure that the team members could use the system seamlessly. The reporting interface was so simple that after clicking a button and then filling in the eight fields, the problem was sent to the right team. The whole team of organizers was able to learn this process from start to finish in a 90-minute training session, so all of the organizing staff members knew how to use the interface.

As Jira users, the L1 staff escalated tasks that could not be solved at that level to the L2 level. The L2 people were the classic solution people; they could already search in Jira. At the L3 level, only requests for change with a material or system-wide impact were received, 29 in total. The change management team had to go through an approval workflow in this case.

Lessons learned

At the beginning of the event, the question was asked of whether there was a justification for an incident management tool in the operational environment of an event.

One of the most significant benefits of integrating Jira was measurability, as when the performance reports came in, the SLA numbers made it possible to know exactly whether a team or subcontractor had done their job correctly.

On the other hand, there was also a huge lesson to be learned about how vital it is to get the right problems to the right person at the right time instead of trying to deal with them through lengthy phone calls and email communication.

META-INF sought to make the interface for reporting problems as simple as possible. The result spoke for itself, with only eight fields to fill in, two of which were free text, with the rest multiple choice.

Jira Service Management
Jira Service Management is Atlassian’s service management solution for all teams. It is designed to help you unlock high-velocity teams by empowering every team to deliver great service fast, bringing visibility to work, and accelerating the flow of work between development, IT, and business teams.

Source: Maintenance at the World Aquatics Championships - Hungarian Atlassian Meetup