What are work categories?

There are five main IT Service Management (ITSM) work categories in Jira Service Management.

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 how to add work categories to any of your projects.

Service requests are requests for information, access to a service, or for something new to be provided. Common service requests could include: “I need a new laptop”, “I need to reset my password”, or “How do I access my account?“. Learn more about service requests.

Incidents are unplanned events that disrupt or reduce the quality of your service (or threaten to do so). An example of an incident might be a specific instance of application or hardware malfunction such as data issues or network failures. An incident can be upgraded to a major incident if it represents a critical disruption to a service that requires an emergency response. Learn more about incident management.

Problems are the underlying causes of recurring (or potential) incidents. Requests in the Problems category aim to identify and eliminate the root causes of an incident. For example, “Internal tooling keeps crashing.“ Learn more about problem management.

Changes include anything involving organizational changes to IT infrastructure, such as rolling out new services or upgrading software. Learn more about change management.

Post-incident reviews bring people and teams together to discuss the details of an incident: why it happened, what impact it had, what actions were taken to resolve it, and how the team can prevent it from happening again. Learn more about post-incident reviews.

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