Expose Problem to external Organisation

[Phillip Collins]

We use JIRA Service Desk to manage Service Request and Incidents for our external customers. They log their issue via the customer portal and our service desk analysts complete the work. We have been working like this for a year and all's good.

For our next stage we want to implement Problem Management. The process we intend to implement will have the service desk analyst close the Incident and create a Problem where deeper investigation into root cause is required. We would like the customer/s who are affected by this issue to have some visibility, via the customer portal, of the Problem record. We don't want them to be able to create a Problem or add a Comment to a Problem - just see their is a Problem and its current status.

The issue we've found is that the out-of-the box Problem record does not allow us to make the Problem visible to any customer Organisation.

Has anyone come across a similar issue?

Anyone with a solution or idea how we could solve our issue?

Thanks to all in advance.

[Bastian Stehmann]

Maybe this idea is a possible workaround for you.

Instead of closing the incident, leave it open and add comments via post-function to this incident whenever a problem to this incident is added or transitioned.

That way you must not make the problem itself available to the customer portal and the customer can see progress of the problem in the incident.

When all problems are resolved, the incident can be closed aswell.

[Phillip Collins]

Thanks for your thoughts Bastian, we had thought of something similar, but were wondering what others had implemented.

We have a "Open issues" KPI for the Support team that would be blown out of the water if we were to keep Incidents open for longer. We could look at modifying what we count, so could adopt your idea.

The positive aspect of your suggestion is that customers could easily see their issues are not lost and are still being worked on.

[Bastian Stehmann]

Maybe adding a new status to your workflow like "further investigation" or something like that will help. 

You can then exclude issues in that status from your KPI.

[Phillip Collins]

Again thanks for your help Bastain. We did think about your suggestion but this would not have allowed us to link the same issue from several customers to the one Problem. 

We've decided to setup a new Project "Problem Management" and link the original Incident to a new Problem ticket in this new project. When we find similar issues raised by different customers we link each Incident to the Problem. The added benefit of doing this means we can easily see all the Problems with their linked issues and this help with grooming our list and prioritizing those that have to be investigated over those that have occurred only once for example. We've used Script Runner as part of our setup so that when we transition a Problem through its life-cycle: open->investigation->competed each customer linked to the Problem will get an update. It is very brief update that only indicates that the Problem has moved along but its at least showing progress. In future we may be able to add a Comment that updates the Problem & associated Incidents.

Our next task is to surface our Problems under investigation to our customers so they can also search these as a type of "known issues" list.

cheers