Summary

• Jira Service Management (JSM) offers a structured system for prioritising work in IT service management (ITSM).
• You can prioritise work items on an individual or group basis in JSM.
• Jira priority levels and Jira alert priorities are the prioritisation features for individual tickets. You can use the default priorities or create your own. Support agents can assign priorities manually or you can build Jira automation rules to do it for you.
• Two ways of doing prioritisation are with an urgency impact priority matrix, or a value vs complexity priority matrix.
• Atlassian Rovo offers a built-in AI assistant that analyses work items and suggests a priority.
• You can prioritise groups of tickets using Jira queues.
• You can prioritise groups of queues using Jira priority groups.

Why priority in Jira is the key to great ITSM

The key to great service delivery in IT service management (ITSM) is knowing how to prioritise incoming requests, incidents, and other IT work.

Without clear and consistent prioritisation, less important issues get dealt with first, and critical services remain disrupted. This leads to wasted effort, frustrated employees and customers, and overloaded support agents.

Jira Service Management (JSM) aims to turn ITSM prioritisation from a fuzzy conversation about what to do next into a structured system for focusing effort where it matters most. This system includes:

• Jira priority levels
• alert priorities for incident management
• queues
• priority groups

In this article, we’ll look at how priority works in Jira Service Management to drive efficiency, align ITSM with business goals, and set clear expectations for employees and customers.

Priority in Jira Service Management

In Jira Service Management, there are ways to prioritize individual requests/work items and groups of requests. For individual tickets, you have Jira priority levels. You also have alert priority levels for incidents. In addition, there’s Service Triage, which is an Atlassian Rovo agent designed to automatically triage requests and instantly suggest a Jira priority level to a support agent.

JSM lets you zoom out from a single ticket and manage collections of requests by priority too. The first level of group management is queues. You can create queues so that requests get filtered into specific queues based on certain criteria. This allows agents to work out which groups of requests they should attend to first.

JSM lets you zoom out even further and add a broader level of group management by priority. This is by putting queues into priority groups. That way, a group of queues can be prioritised over another. This becomes essential as Jira service projects grow and more and more queues are added. It’s also useful when you have more than one team of support agents working in a single service project.

Let’s look first at individual Jira ticket priority levels.

Priority levels in Jira Service Management

All work items in Jira Service Management, which include service requests and tasks created internally by agents, have a Jira priority level.

By default, the Jira priority levels are:

• Lowest: a trivial problem with little to no impact on progress
• Low: a minor problem for which there’s an easy workaround
• Medium: has the potential to affect progress
• High: a serious problem that could block progress
• Highest: the problem will block progress.

Your Jira admin can customise the name, description, colour, and icon of a priority in Jira Service Management. You can also add more.

Customer-submitted requests are automatically assigned a medium priority level by default. You can change this default in your service project’s field configuration. You can also use Jira automation rules to set priority based on specific conditions.

A support agent can change the priority of a work item at any time.  

How to calculate priority in Jira Service Management

Priority levels in Jira Service Management are great, but they don’t help teams to know how to prioritise a work item.

Here are a few different approaches.

Making a JSM impact urgency priority matrix

Jira Service Management comes with two custom fields that help with prioritisation: the urgency and impact fields. Agents can select the values for impact and urgency that Jira provides, e.g. “critical” to “lowest” for urgency and “extensive” to “minor” for impact — or you can create your own values.

Impact is to do with how much something affects an organisation’s processes. Urgency is how quickly it will impact the organisation. For example, a high-impact incident might have low urgency because it’s not going to affect the business till the end of the financial year.

In order to determine a priority based on the values entered in the impact and urgency fields, a team can use an impact urgency priority matrix. Jira automation can also be used to do this for you.  

An impact urgency priority matrix is a grid or table like the one below, where specific combinations of impact and urgency map to a defined priority level.

The basic idea is:

• High impact + high urgency = highest priority
• Low impact + low urgency = lowest priority
• Other combinations fall between those extremes.

A JSM impact urgency priority matrix reduces guesswork when classifying work items and makes sure all prioritisation efforts follow the same logic. Automating the process of assigning a priority based on the values in your priority matrix also means faster triage and more predictable handling.

Making a JSM value vs complexity priority matrix

You could find that your JSM impact urgency priority matrix is great for prioritising reactive work like incidents and requests, but not as good for prioritising proactive and strategic IT work like platform improvements or security initiatives.

So you might want to complement your priority matrix with an additional prioritisation framework. Value vs complexity is a good option for proactive tasks.

Value is how valuable a task is to customers or the business. Complexity is how hard, risky, or time-consuming it is to deliver. High-value, low-complexity tasks are prioritised first, and low-value, high-complexity tasks are deprioritised.

In Jira Service Management, you can create “business value” and “complexity” custom fields, assign numerical values, and add them to your change/improvement/problem work item types.

You can use a value vs complexity priority matrix to determine the priority. Just like the impact urgency matrix, high and low value/complexity map to defined priority levels. You can then use a Jira automation rule to calculate priorities according to the matrix.

Jira priority recommendations from Atlassian Rovo

Service Triage is an out-of-the-box Atlassian Rovo agent that comes with Jira Service Management. The AI assistant will analyse the content, sentiment, and other details of a request to instantly suggest a priority level. It will also look at service-level agreements (SLAs) and, if needs be, suggest escalation to make sure critical issues are handled in a timely manner.

Alert priorities for incidents in JSM

An alert in Jira Service Management is a message sent to an individual or team signifying something that requires attention. They’re used in IT incident management for incidents such as a service disruption.

The alert priority tells you the severity of the alert and affects who is notified, what notifications they receive, and how/when they receive them. For example, a low-priority alert could be sent by email, whereas a critical alert could trigger a Slack message, push notifications, or even a voice call.

Incident and alert priorities

If there is a service disruption or some other unplanned event, an incident work item will have been created for it in JSM. This incident ticket will have been given a priority level. Jira lets you give your alerts the same priority level as the incident, or a different one. For example, for a high-priority incident, you may only want to send low-priority alerts.

Jira Service Management queues

Queues in Jira Service Management allow you to prioritise groups of tickets. So, you might have a situation where requests coming in from a particular office or customer are a higher priority than others. You’d make a queue for it, e.g. “Sydney Office Requests” or “Stark Industries”. All requests for that office/customer would get filtered into that queue, so that agents can focus their efforts there.

Alternatively, you may have a “time to first response” SLA goal. You could create a queue that lists the requests that are closest to expiring on that goal, called “SLA Priority Requests”.

Jira priority groups

Jira priority groups offer a second layer of group management by allowing you to prioritise groups of queues. This enables agents to more quickly identify, categorise, and address incoming requests based on their urgency and relevance.

For example, you could have a priority group called “Critical Operations”. Inside this group could be queues like “Critical Incidents”, “Requests Affecting Multiple Customers”, and “Executive Requests”. Then you could have a priority group called “Standard Service Requests”, which has queues like “Routine Access Requests”, “Low-Impact Issues”, and “General Inquiries”.

A layered approach to prioritisation in Jira

Jira Service Management offers a range of ways for ITSM teams to organise and prioritise their work.

Jira priority levels, the impact and urgency fields, the Service Triage agent, and alert priorities allow you to prioritise individual work items and incident alerts. JSM queues offer agents a focused view of their work by grouping specific types of work items together. And if you have a sprawling service project handling a large volume of service requests, then Jira priority groups offer another level of organisation above queues.

All in all, this layered approach to prioritisation in Jira means that whether you’re looking at a single ticket or a whole category of queues, everyone has a shared understanding of what matters most. The result is faster response times, less wasted effort, and a smoother experience for both support teams and the people relying on them.

If you want to start delivering upgraded service with smarter prioritisation, Togetha can get you up and running with Jira Service Management in just two weeks.