Jira Service Management Case Study

Building a Workflow and Process for Service Desk and Problem Management Integration

Good Incident Management in Organization is not an easy thing to accomplish. To make it more obvious, let’s start with the definitions.

An Incident is an event, which makes a service work in an incorrect way, not included in the specification. A Problem – on the other hand – is the underlying cause of an Incident.

No one is happy because of an incident, especially that the underlying problems are often not possible to be solved by the 1st Line of Support in a Service Desk project, as the root cause lies deeper in the system, thus requires a different level of competencies. The process might also include the owner of the service and the management. All these people will need to cooperate at some point. As you can see, this is a complex situation. Thankfully, this can be managed.

The Solution

We’ve created a solution to this situation, basing it on the principles of ITIL good practices. The solution assumes dividing and synchronizing the scope of work between the Service Desk and Problem Management projects. Both projects need to be able to communicate both with Service Desk and the requestor.

The Requirements

Creating a second Software or Core project meant for the people not requiring a Service Desk Agent license, e.g. software developers or managers.
Automatic solution copying issues classified as a problem to the Problem Management project. The issues will be linked by a Jira link as an Incident and Problem (from the respective sides).
Automatic synchronization script copying comments between projects, so both the issues have the same information regarding the work process.
A possibility to close the Incident by applying a workaround, if the requestor agrees.
A possibility to turn on the public comments function for users without a Service Desk Agent license.
Synchronization of statuses allows the requestor to see what’s going on with his request.
Acceptance and Analysis process.

The Workflow

Below you’ll find the workflow which was created for the sake of our solution.

The Benefits

Our solution primarily allows us to save the employees’ time by integrating Incident and Problem management into one, transparent process. The desirable side effect is saving the license cost for Jira Service Desk licenses.

It also allows us to transparently present the work progress to the requestor and shift the responsibility from Service Desk Agents to a qualified Platform Support team.