Incident management in Jira

[RuneKChristensen]

Hi,

I am looking into expanding the use of JIRA to support ITIL incident management. Initially I want to pair incidents from HPSM with issues in JIRA.

My question is if there are any best practices for using issue types in JIRA to represent incidents from ITIL? I want to differentiate incidents from bugs so I have a view of defects found before/after the product is released. Is it as simple as just creating an incident issue type or ... ?

Secondly I want my solution to be able to support the use of JIRA service desk in the future.

Thanks,
Rune

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

To keep it really simple, yes!

A new issue type of Incident is the most simple, and probably the most clear way to do this.  If you go with an incident issue type, you'll be able to give it different fields and workflows to the other issue types as well, if you want.  And it will fully support Service Desk in the future too.

[Greg Baker]

I suspect I'm not adding much to @Nic Brough [Adaptavist]'s answer, but I'm reasonably experienced with both tools, so I thought I'd add in my $0.02 worth.

When someone talks about the Incident Management from HPSM, they are often including Service Incident and Problem tickets because they are both often touched by the same Incident management teams. Sometimes they are also talking about Interaction tickets because they are in the "incident" table in HPSM. And very occasionally, it's just Incident tickets.

JIRA doesn't have a simple way of representing the rules of what kinds of tickets can and can't be interlinked (e.g. an problem can't be linked to an interaction unless it's a closure). To be honest, I don't think it's worth caring about this.

I think what will happen is this:

• You will create a project in JIRA for incident tickets. You might be tempted to get a key prefix of IM- to match Service Manager, but you will probably cause yourself great pain with this because the suffixes will get out of sync between the two products and so you'll end up saying "IM-2123 in JIRA is IM-2555 in Service Manager".
• You will create a new ticket type which gets used for the incident tickets. You will probably want to add some extra fields (such as the original Service Manager ticket reference). Maybe some extra screens as well.
• You will write a script that monitors Service Manager every few minutes and populates JIRA. Alternatively, you could create something in the ScriptLibrary in Service Manager and call it from a FormatControl whenever a ticket is created or changed. Maybe this should populate the "External Reference Number" field in Service Manager with the JIRA ticket number.
• You will write a script that gets triggered by JIRA updates which updates Service Manager.

That should sort out your incident sync.

When you start doing Service Desk in JIRA, you will create a new project, which will be a Service Desk project. It will have nothing to do with the Incident tickets in JIRA.

I'll try to write up a bit more detail about JIRA service desk sync to Service Manager Interactions if you are interested, but that will be some time in the future if ever.

I have another customer embarking on a vaguely similar project, so there might be some way of leveraging each others' work. By the way you might find this python code helpful for ( reading from | writing to )  Service Manager: http://www.ifost.org.au/Software/sm-tools/smcli.py 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

>I suspect I'm not adding much to...
That's adding a lot, it's really useful. 

[RuneKChristensen]

Great answers. Thanks a lot for your help.

Rune