how to rank issues in Jira Service Management?

[EQTribe - Efficiency Quotient]

How to rank issues in Jira Service Desk? Dragging issues does not work in Service Management

[Ben Gallant]

We use the "Board" feature in Jira Software to rank Jira Service Management (JSM) tickets in KANBAN. 

You can create a new personal board and populate the board with tickets from your JSM project. You can then drag the tickets up and down to set the rank. 

We have set up our board to use the following filter query:

project = [your project key] ORDER BY Rank ASC

To get started, go to: https://[your instance name].atlassian.net/jira/boards

I found this answer here.

[Jeroen Habets]

Thanks @Ben Gallant but we cannot afford a Jira license for each of our customers. We were aware of this possibility when commenting below.

[Jeroen Habets]

Still a valid requirement: we discuss and align Bug and Change priorities with our customers.

Bugs are covered by our SLA but even then: which of the "major" issues should be picked up first? Driven by which has the most impact for the customer(s).

Changes need to be proposed and refined in order of the customer priority.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

That's fine, it's good to talk with customers, but that suggests that you aren't really treating the issues as service requests any more, they've become issues that need managing in a more development style way.

You can still create a board and rank the issues in there, just be aware that on Cloud, boards have to be associated with a project (even when they have nothing to do with the project), so you have to have a Software project to act as a access point, with a board that looks at your Service Desk project(s) 

[Jeroen Habets]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-of course in Service Management requests are first prioritized according to their priority and their SLA but then...then what? E.g. of the 10 Major tickets which should go first when the last one logged is most important yet not a Critical.

I guess it all depends on how closely you collaborate with your customers. For anonymous ticket processing factories, the pure priority + report date of JSM may suffice.

You are correct that this is exacerbated once you start to also collaborate with your customers on custom development.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

See the answer I gave May 19, 2021

[Jeroen Habets]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist-my response was to that answer. But I'll make it more explicit for you: creating a board for only Jira users is not the solution if you collaborate closely with your (JSM) customers, it should be a feature of JSM.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ok, I think I may have explained my point badly in that post.  I focussed on treating requests as though they were development issues.

That is what I meant, though.  It's great to collaborate with your customers closely (far too few of us do it well), but if you are working with them well enough to have them involved in prioritisation and ranking, then you've got two extra things to think about:

• How do things fit in with all of the customers?
  • Will you let them see other customer priorities, or more importantly, the justifications for the other customer's priorities?  You can't involve them in ranking unless they have the whole picture.
• And also your organisation's vision/roadmap/plans overall?  It is great when you can, (and Atlassian really really wants me to type "Open company, no bullshit" here), but you do need to consider your customer knowledge and interaction carefully.

How are you going to balance that?

• Jira Software (with the boards, backlogs, and ranking) is designed to accept customer input and prioritisation via the product owner - they are supposed to be aware of customer "asks" and be able to balance, prioritise, judge, and hence tell the team what the best thing to do is.
• JSM is a service-management application; it is focussed on "This went bang / needs work" and "for us".  It is not a bad way to gather "we should look at ..." questions, but I want to be clear that it emphasises the "for us".  JSM is not intended to be a customer-facing design and prioritisation system, it's intended for "our (private) group needs you to deal with something".

In JSM, most of the time, you should be looking at the queues.  Set them up so that they "rank" everything automatically. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Ranking is a Software function. 

Generally in Service Management working patterns, we're not expected to choose what to do first for ourselves, we're expected to have a set of rules that tell us what to do next.  That's usually based on the SLA, and the usual way to represent it is to build queues that show the order things should be done in.

[Jeroen Habets]

This is a perfectly adequate solution for anonymous ticket processing factories.