Managing Incidents - The roof is on FIRE!

The roof is on FIRE… network outages, broken processes, upset clients and employees. Each day seemed to bring more and more issues. Incidents were communicated via email, messengers (skype or teams) or verbally, without documentation. The end result is an endless loop of incident resolution without an understanding of the root cause, workarounds, accountability, and documentation. We had many internal meetings discussing possible resolutions to our incident management process but the fires were spreading quicker than we could react. It seemed like an endless loop without a light at the end of the tunnel.

We took a step back and looked at our internal products that have already been implemented. Do we have existing products that can accommodate incident management?  Our software development team uses Jira for project management and Confluence for documentation. Further vetting Atlassian products, we tried out Jira Service Desk (JSD). We knew we had no time to test new solutions, users prefer email and the company is growing at 35% year-over-year.  

Jira Service Desk was already installed but never used and allows incoming emails to be converted to service desk tickets. This is GREAT! We decided to move forward with a license for Jira Service Desk and put a process into place.  

  1. Customers can email a servicedesk.com address for all internal issues. 
  2. Emails are automatically converted into trackable tickets with a unique key, date, time and reporter name. 
  3. Customers are grouped into organizations for transparency into requests across the business. 
  4. Service Desk Agents link service desk tickets to other Jira Projects to be prioritized by development or operations teams. 
  5. The linked tickets contain requirements, time estimates and Confluence links to technical documentation. 
  6. The linked tickets are prioritized and eventually resolved. Public Confluence articles providing documentation, workarounds, and resolutions are created and linked to cards.  
  7. The linked tickets are completed and the service desk ticket is updated. 
  8. Customers are notified along the way. 
  9. Service Desk linking to Confluence documentation allows customers to view the most up-to-date resolution documentation for reference 

Although the process took a few months to build and a year to get everyone on board, we now have a process for incident resolution. The process gives full, end-to-end auditing and reporting we need for compliance purposes. Our process is still being improved today but the most important part is that the process makes sense to all departments across the business. Thank you, Jira Service Desk!!! 

2 comments

jurgis.gaigals@pasts.lv November 20, 2019

Hi,

could you please guide me in details this phase: "Service Desk Agents link service desk tickets to other Jira Projects to be prioritized by development or operations teams. "? What does SD agent do in steps? Does SD agent create a new separate issue for example 'bug' in other JIRA project and copy + paste info from incident and than links those issues?

Thanks!

Thomas B
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November 25, 2019

Hey jurgis.gaigals@pasts.lv , thanks for reading! The Service Desk Agents are responsible for resolving operational issues but in the off chance that software engineers need to get involved:

  1. Agents open the Service Desk Ticket
  2. Agents 'Create linked issue' into the respective project
  3. That issue is linked from the Development Project to the Service Desk Project
  4. From there, it is handled by our management in grooming and prioritization through the backlog

In this case, there is no need for copy and pasting. The contents of the SD Ticket copy over to the DEV Story and Jira, by default, creates a link between the two tickets so the audit trail is there. Since we are a small team, we don't really care if the ticket is identified as a 'bug', 'story' or 'tasks' but for the sake of best practices... it should probably be identified as a bug!

Thanks

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