JSM Major Incident field on transition screen

[Joe Johnson]

Morning community,

We have a use case for making the Major Incident toggle in JSM only available to certain groups. As field security isn't possible and plugins are also not an option, I tried placing it on a transition screen with the intention of making that transition only available to a certain group, but it shows as 'unsupported' on the screen during the transition. (I tried to add a screengrab here but cannot for some reason).

Frustrating. The only other option that I have come up with is to use automation in a variety of interesting ways e.g. check if the user who changed the field is part of the correct group or not, or trigger the field to toggle when a certain transition is performed, but I'd prefer to just make it available only to certain users.

Has anyone else experienced this or have a workaround? Seems fairly obvious that you might want to place the Major Incident toggle on a transition screen.

Thanks!
Joe

[Joe Johnson · Accepted solution]

Just to follow up on where we landed in case anyone else has the same issue.

I offered several solutions to the team including the one suggested by Lisa F. above, and in the end, the MIM team decided they would prefer one of the other options wherein when the MI switch is toggled, an automation rule checks who initiated the action. If that user is not part of the Major Incident managers group, then it the switch is toggled back to the previous state. So, if turned ON, it will revert to OFF and vice versa.

Obviously, the caveat to this is that is if there are notifications or other automations triggered when the switch is toggled, it will not stop these from happening, only revert the switch back to whatever it was before. Imperfect solution, but it fits for their use case.

[Lisa Forstberg]

Hi @Joe Johnson ,

In one of my clients sites we automatically communicate to senior stakeholders as soon as the toggle goes on so the consequence of toggling it on by mistake is quite large.

We landed on the fact that it is important that operations should have the toggle close at hand, and that it is more important to toggle it on prematurely than running the risk on having it not toggled on when it really should if its only available for a few users.

We informed and trained the large group of operations staff on the consequences

Basically at this site all first line operations need to consider toggling on asap when they suspect a major incident, major incident manager comes on to validate it, and may toggle it off. We're sending out additional notifications when the toggle goes off to notify management again.

To be honest we haven't seen a misuse, despite the fact that the operations organisation is quite large. 

best regards

Lisa

[Joe Johnson]

Hi @Lisa Forstberg 

Thanks for the reply. I like your approach and am also of the general opinion that due to its nature, the Major Incident toggle lean towards being more accessible and then further supported by process e.g. review by MIMs. I have thusly offered up the solution of simply making the the toggle available and communicating when it should and should not be used, and additionally flagging to MIMs for review when toggled on.

That said, in the current environment we have an unusually large JSM agent userbase due to the way things have historically been set up; not an ideal situation and something I'm working on rationalising, but won't be a quick fix.

Aside from license considerations, the other challenge of a proportionally large number of people with agent access is that not all of them are strictly internal operations which makes training/comms more complicated, which is one of the drivers for the request to limit access.

I am heartened to see that misuse has not been an issue for you - this helps reinforce the first solution described, so I'll be sure to add your insights to the discussion.