Pulling data without built out issue or request types

Question

Hi there!

I recently became the team lead of our service desk at my company, and I'm seeing a lot of opportunities for improvement. One of these opportunities is that we have very few granular issue types.

[System] Problem 
Employee offboarding 
Employee onboarding 
IT Help 
Service Request 
Service Request with Approvals 
Task

None of these issue types really resonate with any kind of granular issue, which maybe is normal, because you'd want the issue to manage the back end workflow with the request type being the actual front end? I'd like to confirm this with someone who would know better.

Regardless, I'm wanting to be able to track common occurrences and weight them over the past 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, so that we can potentially build out some better workflows for our SLA breaching issues.

Does anyone have any advice for how to pull what a ticket is -actually- about rather than trying to leverage these generic issue types? Perhaps we should search by Descriptions & Summaries for key words? Just looking for a creative approach, thanks!

Alice L · Answer

I haven’t! Components and labels sound like a pretty solid approach, maybe there’s a way to pull summary and description data and assign labels/components based on keywords?

Alice L · Answer

Is Request Type what most people use for JSM while just using issue type to manage the actual logical workflow? I’m sure there’s some thoughts floating around out there about how best to manage issue types vs request types and how the workflows inform the attached requests

Alice L · Answer

I appreciate the validation! Yeah there’s not too much info that we have access to, our Service Desk isn’t much above default issue types. I think my only option is trying to somehow aggregate summary and description data, so I think this might require an API approach