Problem Management with Jira Service Management

Problems are part of the life, especially so when you have complex applications. Complex applications will bring in complex problems too. However, managing those problems should not be a complex activity. Most organizations struggle to streamline their problem management processes which leads to breaching of SLA, customer dissatisfaction and lots of technical re-work.

Problem management is essential for identifying and understanding the underlying causes of an incident as well as identifying the best method to eliminate that root cause. An incident may be over once the service is up and running again, but until the underlying causes and contributing factors are addressed, the problem remains. 

In this article, we will discuss what are the common challenges that are encountered during the problem management and how these challenges are catered by Jira Service Management.

Problem Statement 1: Our agents end up resolving the same incident many times. How do we create a problem out of it?

Resolving an incident is not enough, unless a proper root cause analysis is done, and the cause is fixed. Jira Service Management allows you to create a Problem type, which can then be assigned to a problem workflow. The problem then goes to the developers who fix it so that the similar problem does not occur again.

Problem Statement 2: Can our agents do an initial cause analysis before assigning to the developer?

Jira service Management allows integration of deployment pipelines directly, which helps your agents to know if there has been any recent deployments or new change being pushed. This helps them assign the problem to relevant team members and they can also point to the relevant area of change.

Problem Statement 3: Our incident management teams, and our development teams are different. Sometimes our agents end up opening problem tickets which are already in development backlog.

This is a common problem. The incident management team is not always aware of active development cycle. However, the Jira Management makes it possible for the incident managers to be able to view the active development tasks and even the pending backlog. Therefore, such redundant tickets can be avoided.

Problem Statement 4: Is there any help offered in documenting the outcomes of a problems after it has been fixed.

Documenting the root cause of a problem and its solution is very important to deal with a similar scenario in future. With its inbuilt integration with Confluence, Jira Service Management provides you facility of maintaining proper documents. You can also run reports to reveal if any other existing problems has a similar RCA and can group all such problems together. You can also document and share a work-around solution until the main problem is not fixed, so that others in the team are aware that the problem is a known problem.