Incident management
Since the goal of incident management is to restore a service as quickly as possible, the service desk is not expected to perform root cause analysis to identify why an incident occurred. Root cause analysis is the focus of a problem investigation, and is covered in Problem management. However, it's important that the service desk team capture all relevant information while working on the issue, because this may be important when responding to future incidents.
Incident management process
When the service desk team responds to incidents, it's important that they follow a predefined process to streamline the response and reduce the risk of prolonged service outages. The following process represents an example incident response based on ITIL recommendations. Your team can adapt the example to your existing ITIL processes, or use it to define new ones.
Common incident response process considerations include:
- What Service Level Agreements (SLAs) define incident priorities, escalation paths, and resolution time frames?
- What incident procedures can provide standardized responses and ensure incidents are resolved efficiently?
- What types of incident categorizations are required for better data gathering and problem management?
- What is needed for incident statuses, categories, and priorities to properly classify, track and report on incidents?
- What is the process and procedure for major incident response?
- What are the proper incident management role responsibilities and assignments needed to ensure an effective process?
Set up incident management in Jira Service Desk
Configure the workflow and fields with the Incident Management workflow add-on
We used the ITIL framework to build the following workflow add-on for incident management: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.servicedesk.incident/server/overview.
You can use this workflow as a template for your own incident management process.
To use the workflow from the Marketplace:
- Log in as a user that has the Jira administrator global permission, and follow the instructions listed here to import a workflow.
- To add the workflow fields to your incidents, activate the screen by following the instructions here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/adminjiracloud/defining-a-screen-776636475.html#Definingascreen-Activatingascreen.
Incident management workflow
When you import the workflow, it creates the following screens and custom fields:
Incident management fields
We recommend the use of the following fields for your incident management process:
Field | Description | Sample values |
---|---|---|
Description | Captures basic information about the incident | |
Status | The state of the incident | |
Pending reason | Why the incident is pending | Waiting on vendor, More info required, Awaiting approval |
Priority | Determined by the urgency and impact of the incident. Your team can define the value according to your own processes. | Critical, High, Medium, Low |
Urgency | How quickly the incident needs to be resolved | Critical, High, Medium, Low |
Impact | The extent of the incident and the potential damage it causes while it's unresolved | Extensive / Widespread, Significant / Large, Moderate / Limited, Minor / Localized |
Operational categorization | Classifies an incident for the purpose of assignment and reporting from the operational perspective | Configuration > Printer |
Product categorization | Classifies an incident for the purpose of assignment and reporting from the product perspective | Hardware > Printer |
Source | Where the incident was discovered | Phone, Email, Monitoring event |
Component | The service impacted by the incident | |
Resolution | How the incident was resolved |