Getting started with incident, change, and problem management

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Hi Jira Service Management Community!

I’m Lisa and I’m a Product Marketing Manager on the Jira Service Management team. In this spirit of JSM June, the team wanted to make sure you’re on your A-game with three interconnected ITSM practices: incident management, change management, and problem management. This post will include an overview of each of the aforementioned practices, how to get started, best practices, and resources to dive in even deeper.

Without further ado, let’s jump in!

Incident Management

What is incident management?

Incident management is the process used by DevOps and IT Operations teams to respond to an unplanned event or service interruption and restore the service to its operational state.

- Incident: An unplanned interruption to a service or reduction in the service quality.

- Major incident: An incident with significant business impact, requiring an immediate coordinated resolution.

The incident management workflow

Jira Service Management provides an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) compliant incident management workflow called ISD: Incident Management workflow for Jira Service Management. We recommend you start with this workflow and adapt it to your business needs over time.

Getting started with incident management in Jira Service Management

1. Set up your profile to get notifications [video]

2. Set up a response team [video]

3. Assign an owner team to a service [video]

4. Level-up your incident management response [documentation]

Resources 

• Handbook: Atlassian Incident Management Handbook

• https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management

• Tutorials:

  • Incident communication

  • On call schedule

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Change Management

 

What is change management?

Change management—also known as change enablement—is an IT practice designed to minimize disruptions to IT services while making changes to critical systems and services. 

A change is adding, modifying, or removing anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services.

Common types of changes: 

• Standard change: Pre-approved changes that are low risk, performed frequently, and follow a documented process. For example, adding memory or creating a new instance of a database. 

• Normal changes: Non-emergency changes that require further review and approval by the CAB, such as migrating to a new data center or making performance improvements. 

• Emergency changes: Changes that arise from an unexpected error or threat that needs to be addressed immediately. Think implementing a security patch or dealing with a server outage. 

Treat each change differently based on the level or risk, and draw on data from previous changes to make better decisions going forward. Over time, by leveraging data, you’ll be able to use pre-approvals and automation to ship changes faster without compromising on risk.

Getting started with change management in Jira Service Management

Changes help you record, review, and approve changes so your teams can quickly deploy changes and minimize risk.

1. Connect your CI/CD pipeline [video]

2. Add change approvers to a service [video] [documentation]

3. Make the most of change management [documentation]

Resources 

- Ten change management best practices | Atlassian

- Change management | Atlassian

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Problem management 

What is problem management?

Problem management is the process of identifying and managing the causes of incidents, in order to reduce the number and impact of future incidents. 

The problem management process

 

Getting started with problem management in Jira Service Management

- Demo: Problem Management

Resources 

• Best practices for problem management | Atlassian Support 

• What is problem management? A guide | Atlassian 

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Please let us know if this type of content is helpful, and don’t hesitate to share any of your own best practices!

Cheers,
Lisa