Pulling data without built out issue or request types

[Alice L]

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!

[Girish Reddy]

Hopefully there are fields on these issue/request types (e.g. department, problem type, etc) that could help you find the granularity on your historical cases.

Your thought process of understanding the granularity of historical cases and letting that inform your new design makes a lot of sense.

[Alice L]

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

[Mikael Sandberg]

Hi Alice,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

JSM is different from other flavors of Jira in that it is using both issue types and request types. A single issue type can be linked to multiple request types. So I would use the request type to track the different requests you get.

[Alice L]

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

[Wendy Barrington]

Have you looked at using (and updating if necessary) Components for specific issue type?

[Alice L]

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?