Product vs Operational categories vs Services

paulcreedy

I'm trying to get my head around the categorisation of a ticket.

The main options it would seem are services, product categories and operational categories.

How are others using these combinations? What's the difference between an operational category and a product category?

The only reference I've really been able to find is this one:

Guidance for Product categorization and Operationa... (atlassian.com)

I've read various ITSM guides on incident categorisation but that doesn't directly link to how Jira categorises issues/requests with product and operational categories.

Paul

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @paulcreedy,

Both fields are pre-filled with sample data from Atlassian templates. They contain the following default options ...

for Product:

and for operational:

The main thing I derive from those preset values, is what they are intended for. While you can use product categorisation clearly to approach your tickets from the viewpoint of "what tangible item is this request about", the operational categorisation rather starts from "what do you, service desk customer, want us to do for you". 

The many templates JSM offers are in the box to make it easy for users to spin up a service desk that is operational in no time. And, while that is awesome, the reality is that you would usually have to do some tweaks to make the thing work for your situation.

Basically, you could even forget about these fields entirely. In the end, the title of your request type could cover either approach. But I would recommend to be consistent and, when you start defining the request types that your customers will actually have to use, offer them one of both ways to contact you. Which is best, will be very much defined by how you prefer to interact with your customers (in the first place) and how you triage work to your internal service teams.

Finally, one more thing. I remember 1 single situation where I actually used categorisation custom fields on top of the request types. This was a situation where we decided to offer only 2 request types to the customers:

• "I want to report a problem" (which was the type for incidents)
• "I want to ask a question" (which was the bucket for service requests)

In that situation, it was obviously necessary to let people choose what the problem or question was about. That more or less automagically mapped best to the tangible assets I referred to earlier. You can use the categorisation field that's in the box for that, but nothing stops you from creating your own fields that match your way of working.

This is not a binary yes-or-no kinda thing, but I hope this helps!