Jira Service Management as an incident management tool

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ITSM processes have significantly developed over the last few years. The digital transformation of businesses forced the IT market to fulfill the expectations of more demanding customers. In order to do that, the companies look for the resources that will help to provide the best quality service. At some point, Atlassian’s Jira Service Desk needed to evolve into Jira Service Management to comprehensively cover the growing ITSM needs. 

Jira Service Management is a solution that meets all the requirements of an efficient incident management tool. An intuitive service desk allows customers and team members to notify about service issues. The alerts from clients, employees, and automated notifications are gathered in one place where they can be categorized and prioritized. Jira Service Management lets the Support team keep in touch with the clients during the process. It also informs everyone involved about the current issue status. Thanks to this, a company gains trust and can reduce the number of incoming tickets. The teams can automatically create post-incident reports to improve incident response practice in the future. In Jira Service Management, all related tasks are linked to each other so the employees are able to track them to completion and find the root cause easily. 

How to manage incidents in Jira Service Management? 

Jira Service Management provides a dedicated workflow called Incident Management workflow for Jira Service Management. It’s a good idea to start with it and then adapt the workflow to your business’s individual needs. Below we will present some tips that should help your team manage incidents in JSM. 

Set up SLAs

First, we recommend setting up Service Level Agreements, so it will be possible to track if the team is meeting the customer’s expectations. Jira Service Management has built-in SLAs where project admins can create specific goals. It can be done in the Project Settings, and then the SLA section. The goals should determine the types of requests we wish to track and the estimated time to resolve them. At this point, we can define the conditions and calendars that change when SLA measurements start, pause, or stop.

Highlight major incidents

The next thing will help your team prioritize incidents. If a critical service error appears, it can be marked as major. Major issues are more visible than others and grouped under the JQL-powered Major incident queue. To mark an issue as a major, we need to turn on the major incident toggle in the Details section. 

Integrate with Slack

Jira Service Management allows Slack integration with our service project. We already know that when it comes to incidents, the sooner we step in, the better. With Slack connection, we can create dedicated channels for all our incidents by clicking on the Create channel link. Then we can add incident responders to these channels, update incident priorities, and take incident actions. All this is to help the team act faster in the case of incidents.

Help internal stakeholders stay up to date

The internal stakeholders are not direct responders to an incident. Nevertheless, they still need to be updated about the progress to take precautions and actions. With Jira Service Management, we can add people as stakeholders and update them with e-mail messages. We add stakeholders by selecting Manage next to the stakeholder’s field under issue details. To send an update, we select Update stakeholders from the Activity section of the issue view. 

Track incidents to problems

Jira Service Management lets you easily check the source of incidents. Each issue view has a linked issues field with a list of connected objects. It makes finding the root cause of each incident and the other way around intuitive for the team members. If your project needs more extensive options, try our Extension for Jira Service Management. It provides its users with additional fields, attachments, and views that help make sure all important information is included. 

Create post-incident reviews

Post-incident reviews (PIR) support uncovering weak spots in your service and decrease the time of incident resolution. Documenting incidents informs how similar issues should be handled in the future. With post-incident reviews in Jira Service Management, teams can create long-term solutions to problems. To turn on the feature, navigate to Project settings and Features, and then click on Post-incident reviews under ITSM categories. To create a new report select Create in the top menu bar and choose the post-incident review request type from the drop-down list. After filling out the required information, connect the incident to the PIR in the linked issues field.

Integrate Jira Service Management with Opsgenie

Opsgenie provides its users with notification mechanisms. Teams can automatically create alerts that include detailed information about the issue. The Atlassian tool makes it possible to set up on-call rotations, schedule features, and alert escalations to ensure the best incident management. When users execute actions on the Opsgenie notifications, issues in Jira Service Management automatically update with comments about these actions. If users close the alert, the issue in Jira Service Management is resolved. You can find the information on how to set up Jira Service Management and Opsgenie on Atlassian Community. 

[Airyn]

This is very informative! Thanks for sharing.