The gap between installing Jira Service Management and running services through it

The platform is configured. The operating model is not.

Every Jira Service Management implementation follows the same path: projects, queues, workflows, automation rules. The platform goes live. Tickets flow. Technically, the implementation succeeded.

But none of that answers the questions that determine whether the platform operates as a service system: which team owns which service, how services connect, what depends on what, and where agreements sit between providers and consumers.

Jira Service Management provides the capability to record this structure, but recording it is separate work — and almost nobody does it during implementation. The result is a platform that processes tickets without any awareness of the services those tickets relate to.

Nobody assigns this work.

Platform administrators own projects, permissions, workflows, and automation. Service structure — which team owns which service, how services relate, what agreements govern delivery — sits outside their remit.

Service management leaders run operations: SLAs, escalation paths, reporting. But they inherit whatever the platform gives them. No service structure means spreadsheets, wiki pages, and institutional memory fill the gap.

The work falls between these two roles. The administrator sees it as a service management problem. The service management leader sees it as a platform problem. Neither owns it.

The symptoms appear months later.

For the first few weeks, missing service structure is invisible. Ticket volumes are low and the people who built the platform are still around to answer questions.

Three to six months later: tickets bounce between teams because there is no service-to-team mapping. Reporting takes weeks because data is scattered. Impact analysis is guesswork because dependencies are not recorded. New staff take months to become effective because the service landscape exists only in people's heads.

By then the root cause is buried. Teams build workarounds — Slack channels for routing, shared spreadsheets for ownership, manual processes for impact assessment. Each one adds overhead and obscures the original gap further.

The five problems LaunchPad addresses are symptoms of this missing layer. They feel like separate issues but share a single cause.

LaunchPad closes the gap.

LaunchPad installs the service structure that implementations skip — ownership mapping, dependency connections, and agreement tracking — deployed directly into Jira Service Management so the platform operates as a service system from day one.

This is not configuration advice. LaunchPad deploys working structure into the platform. The work that falls between platform administration and service management is done.