Using work categories in IT service management projects

In IT service management (ITSM), requests are organised into a number of work categories: service requests, incidents, problems, changes and post-incident reviews. Learn more about the different work categories.

These work categories can be enabled in your project to give you more features for your requests. For example, incident requests have access to the incident timeline, alerts and on-call scheduling, while change requests can be scheduled on the change calendar.

These categories are pre-built into the IT service management template, but they can also be added to any of your projects through the Features page. Learn more about the IT service management template, or learn how to add work categories to any of your projects.

If you’d like to see how work categories work before adding them to your service project, you can create a new ITSM project and use the sample space to test, explore and learn about work categories.

Work categories structure your requests – providing dedicated features for your request types and tailored experiences for your agents. These categories are adaptable, so your requests can change as your work changes. For example, requests in the incidents work category can be upgraded to major incidents, while requests in the changes work category can be created automatically when a deployment is initiated.

Work categories also designate where each request type is shown within Jira Service Management. In the navigation sidebar on the left, you can select Queues to see unassigned requests, or select a work category to see the requests within that category, based on the way you have set up your request types. For example, if you select ‘Problems’, you’ll see all of the requests created with a ‘Problems’ request type.

To help you understand how these queues are filtered, you can also see a queue’s default filters while creating it. You’ll find this information under the ‘filters’ heading when you select + Add queue.

Request types are the building blocks of categories. You can create request types that are assigned to specific work categories by navigating to that category and creating the request type there. You can see which work category you’re creating request types in by checking the navigation on the left or the page title. Learn more about request types in ITSM.

If work categories are enabled in your project, any request types not assigned to a work category will be found in the unassigned section of your request types page. Learn more about unassigned request types.