Easy ways to improve your Jira Incident Management
This is the first in a series of blogs that aim at making your Incident Management smoother, quicker and more efficient, which will ultimately improve your customer satisfaction. The series will cover tips and best practice based upon real-world engagement with many users of both Jira Software and Jira Service Desk. Whilst you can implement some tips on their own, we recommend combining them for the best results.
Tracking what needs to be tracked
Incident Management with Jira enables the tracking of incidents from reporting to resolution. A standard implementation will support most incidents in most organisations. However, there are good reasons to look at customisation too.
First, we'll look at the types of Issue that we can track in Jira. Then we'll move on to look at how enhancing, integrating and streamlining Jira makes it more powerful, embedded and valuable. It can deliver greater visibility on the process of handling incidents.
Once you've decided what to track, you'll need to prioritise incidents in order to Triage them more efficiently.
The following table provides the information you need to implement this in Jira. Users of Jira Service Desk will already have some of these Issue types but Jira Software and Jira Core users can create the same Issue Types.
Problem and Incident Icons are provided as part of the installation of Jira Service Desk. We have used additional icons from www.flaticon.com which is a good source of icons for reuse in Jira at a low cost.
Treat Incidents and Alerts separately
By splitting the Incidents and Alerts we can track these with different workflows and timelines for resolution. You may consider an automated Alert to be of higher or lower importance than an Incident reported by an end-user.
Similarly, with the implementation of a Remedial Action you can track the resolution of the Problem without needing to also fix any corrupted data or making changes to processes.
Creating an Issue Type Scheme
Once we have created the Issue Types the next step is to group these in an Issue Type Scheme that can then be applied to our project. This allows our new set of Issue Types to be applied to a project.
Having created our Issue Types for tracking the different types of activity we should consider the way in which these link together. By providing a set of links we can clearly describe the relationship between each pair of Issue Types.
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With the definitions above we can quickly understand the relationships between known problems and the Incidents/Alerts that were caused by the Problem and the Remedial Actions required to address the Problem.
Next steps
Now you've organised your Issue Types, we can move onto how to triage new Incidents or Alerts more effectively. Read the next blog in our incident management series for tips and advice on visualising, organising, and prioritising your Triage.
