ProForma

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  Forms can be used in the JIRA Service Desk customer portal.

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  The form designer can be used by anyone.

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  Have as many forms as you need within a project.

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  The template library is expanding to cover common organisational processes

Inspiration

There are so many tasks in organisations, which are often too complex and too small to ever be improved, which leaves the person responsible for it marooned and unsupported. We think every process in an organization, no matter how small, deserves a well designed system to support it.

From our experience working on another SaaS product, we realized the power of allowing teams to build powerful forms which matched the way that they work. We also realized that many of the form systems available today, while great at collecting an initial submission, had no workflow engine behind them to support more complex business processes. Empowering people to determine how they want to collect information and to manage their own workflow was great not only for the team, but also liberated IT to focus on other projects.

What it does

ProForma helps any team in an organization use JIRA Service Desk to redefine the way they get work done. It does this by

• Providing an ever growing library of template request types and forms that cover the most common processes in HR, Operations, Marketing, Finance, Risk and Legal. Our aim with each template process is to provide a well designed solution to a common organizational process that needs less than 3 minutes of customization before it can be used.
• Allowing people to easily build or customize online forms to meet the particular way they work. Different teams have different ways of collecting information and by allowing people to design their own forms we make it possible for everyone to make the most of JIRA Service Desk without having to be JIRA administrator ninjas.
• By allowing teams to design their own online forms, we free up the time and resources of development and IT team for other tasks.
• The form system supports a growing number of question types, input validation, and also allows for information to be structured into logical sections and questions.
• Forms can be used to create issues through the JIRA Service Desk customer portal or attached to existing issues.

Challenges we ran into

Collecting information on best practice for common organizational processes took longer than expected. We had to downsize our initial list of launch processes; however, in speaking to potential customers we have confirmed that providing template processes, which are easy to customize, is of enormous value as it makes easier for teams to transfer their existing processes to JIRA.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We didn’t want to introduce another external system where critical information is stored outside an organisation’s control. So we were really happy when we found that all of the form design and responses could be stored within our users existing JIRA instances and not on our servers. Customer information is still sent through our servers in order for it to be rendered correctly; however, we never store this information and we will in future versions attempt to remove even this step by having the browser handle the rendering of forms.

What's next for ProForma

Building the template library – Working with our customers, and our expert consultants, we want to continue to build our library of template request types and forms by identifying processes that are common to multiple organizations. The larger the template library, the easier it should be for more teams to use JIRA Service Desk to manage their work.

Form enhancements – There are additional question types, layout options and validation settings that can be added to the form designer. We also want to look at integrating with an existing electronic signature service so that users can ‘sign’ forms and for these signatures to be legally binding.

Building knowledge – We believe that within every organization there is a wealth of knowledge about how to effectively handle common business processes, our aim is to share this knowledge so that people are not needlessly reinventing the wheel when it comes to how to get work done. We will collect this wisdom and publish it through our blog and other sources so that it can help people.

LINK WILL BE PROVIDED ONCE THE APP IS APPROVED IN THE MARKETPLACE