Jira SM for Quality control

[#1]

This spring I worked with the Quality department of a large logistics company helping them use Jira Service Management to support some of their quality processes so I thought I might share a bit of what we did and what configuration items we utilised. I find that assignments Beyond IT are always very rewarding and a true testament that the building blocks in the Atlassian platform are flexible enough to serve any kind of team in any kind of context.

Background - the needs

A lot of incidents, or so called non conformities or discrepancies,  can happen during the process of moving the product off ships and handing it over to resellers. The company needed a solid piece of tooling to support them with fulfilling the following needs:

• Keep a non conformity registry. Logging what happened when, where and for what object.

• Classify and categorize incoming discrepancies.

• Track the current state of an non conformity, what is done to handle the damage short term.

• Track long term mitigations to prevent the same discrepancy to appear again and again.

• Use reports to analyse trends to back larger mitigation efforts to increase quality in their business.

• Support three nordic languages; swedish, norwegian & danish

• High quality image storage. 

As discrepancies can happen in any stage in the value chain all employees needed to have the ability to report a discrepancy.  A group of users on each location are responsible to analyse and work on incoming discrepancies, form short and long term mitigations.

The quality department have the overall responsibility that the business is following policys and procedures and should also be involved to check progress and lend a hand in analysing root causes and suggest good improvements.

Building blocks used

As the non conformity process have many traits in common with the IT Incident process we decided to try using Jira Service Management for this purpose. The whole company, over 800 users who weren't using Jira normally needed to be able to create tickets. Some of the users had however already used Jira SM for reporting IT tickets in the existing IT support portal project so it was only natural to offer one more option via the help center.  As Jira SM allows you to have customer users for free and you can design easy consumer grade issue creation forms this was a huge benefit.

We use two issuetypes: 

• Discrepancy - standard issue type connected to the request form for the reporters

• Mitigation - subtask type

We wanted handle the discrepancies separately to the mitigation for a couple of reasons. The reporter is not too interested in the mitigation so we wanted to hide them and keep it clean for them,  mitigations can be divided and assigned to different users and each mitigation may incur a separate cost for the company. We could use a mitigation standard issue type instead and use links instead but the team really liked the subtask panel so we're sticking with this choice (for now!). The team will probably have a lot of cases where they link new Discrepancies to existing Mitigation to avoid duplications of mitigation actions.

Having just enough custom fields for supporting the lifecycle, filtering and reporting is always a balance act. For discrepancies it is important to track criticality, non conformity types, product involved in discrepancy, root cause category, dates and location.

The Workflow for the Discrepancies contain a step to analyse the root cause and create appropriate mitigation subtasks. When all subtasks are done we needed a phase where the assigned user can reflect and measure the effect of the Mitigations before closing the Discrepancy.

The workflow for the Mitigation (sub task issue type) needed to track the process of implementing a mitigation, collecting the cost of each mitigation before closing it.

We use Assets to hold important objects to support our issue data. Upon issue creation the reporter choose the department where the discrepancy was happening. As this company has a lot of sites we then want to relate department to a location which is related to a country. This can be coupled with an automation to set these values on the actual Discrepancy issue to allow for slicing reports on any level to benefit the overall analysis.

Another benefit  of assets is that we have an jira user attribute on the department  object type and an automation to assign an incoming discrepancy based on this relationship. The quality department can then easily maintain and update the asset list both of departments they want to have and the users responsible per department.

Speaking of Automations, so far we have utilised these:

• Autoset assignee based on Department (mentioned above)

• Sum up total cost of mitigation to the parent task (good for reporting)

• Notify assignee of the Discrepancy when all mitigations are closed (these things can take a while)

• Create a measure from the transition screen (just to help users to get going with creating measures) 

Also to help so called seldom users be aware of their tasks we also set up a few filters with subscriptions for the discrepancy owners. 

To round things off we put together a series of Reporting Dashboards for different stakeholders; one for the Quality department and one per Location to filter and sum up the efforts.

To enhance the reports from a cost perspective we utilise the EazyBI addon for their sum up capabilities in our reports.

All in all we are now very eager to go into the autumn to see what we need to adjust and improve. Taking small steps towards an increased transparency and control will make the overall quality shine we are sure. 

over n out

Lisa

[Andy Gladstone]

Great first article on the Online Community! Thanks for sharing your experiences and learnings from implementing JSM in this environment.