Atlassian takes an integrated approach to ITSM—all their tools work together to help teams deliver better services to both internal and external customers. However, Jira Service Management (JSM), which is built on Jira and is essentially an extension of it, serves as a hub where the tools and processes come together so that IT teams across infrastructure, development, operations, and workplace support, can collaborate around service delivery, service operations, and service support.
In our previous blog post on how JSM streamlines service operations, we explored the tool’s incident management functionality. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at another way JSM streamlines service operations, this time focusing on problem management.
When ITSM and software teams think of incidents, incident management, which is the process of resolving an incident, is naturally often top of mind. Problem management comes after an incident—it’s the process of figuring out what caused the incident in the first place and addressing the root cause systemically to reduce the chance of it happening again. Problem management is every bit as important as incident management, but after the stressful flurry of activity that comes with resolving an incident, managing it—or figuring out what went wrong and addressing it—often gets overlooked.
In both incident management and problem management, JSM serves as a centralized hub, where both IT and software teams can come together to access the information needed to resolve an issue, then later explore why it happened, and even track whether service improvements are being made to prevent its reoccurrence. Since all the information is in one place, it makes it easier for teams to approach both incident management and post-incident problem management as one, wholistic process. By approaching it wholistically, the post-incident review (PIR) process that involves identifying and correcting the issue’s root cause, is less likely to get overlooked.
First, teams can streamline problem management by using JSM to link related issues, changes, bug fixes, and even corrective measures. Then, using a problem record in JSM, they can also track the progress of the post-incident review to see if the root cause has been found and if service improvements to address it are necessary, in progress, or have shipped.
Since all Atlassian products are tightly integrated—JSM is built on top of Jira—it’s easy to take things a step further and set up a Jira dashboard that provides stakeholders with at-a-glance status of all problems, including active problem investigations and resolved problems. Teams can also use Confluence to document and share deeper information about problems being investigated and insights learned from resolving them.
In the same way that JSM is a centralized hub for incident management, it also serves as a centralized hub for the equally important, but more likely to be overlooked, process of problem management. By serving these dual functions, JSM makes it easier for teams to take a wholistic, integrated approach to the two principles, both of which are critical components of service operations.