Create incident management teams in your service project

15 min
Intermediate

By the end of this lesson, you’ll be able to:

  • Set up an incident response team
  • Create and manage an operations team
  • Add your notification preferences

Add users to your ITSM project

Your Jira Service Management ITSM project needs to include users who will work on incidents (both minor and major).
You can also set up an Operations team in Jira Service Management, allowing you to use alerting, on-call schedules, and escalation policies.
The primary users in a service project are Jira product admins, service project admins, agents and incident responders, and customers.
👇Click the boxes below to view the service project users and their roles and responsibilities.
Role: Administrators (Create the Jira Service Management ITSM project and get the role by default)
Responsibilities: Create service projects

Add responders to incidents

To add responders to your incident:
  1. From the side bar beneath your project, select Views.
  2. From your Board views page, select the incident you want to add a responder to.
  3. The Responders field is located on the right side of the incident details window.

    Note:
    The field will be in the Details section if your incident already has responders.
    The field will be in the More fields section if your incident has no responders,
    If you don't see the Responders field on your incident, you may have to add the Responders field to the work item type. See Add or change the fields of an issue type.
  4. Click Responders and add the person. (They must already be added to the service project.)
👇Add responders to incidents in the details section of a ticket.
Work item details view in Jira Service Management. The responders field in the More Fields panel is highlighted.

Assignee is automatically added as a responder.

You can add, view, and remove multiple people and teams as responders in the incident.
👇 Click the numbered icons below to explore an incident with added responders.
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The details view of an incident. The responders field shows two responders.

Configure responder alerts in your ITSM project

You can configure responder alerts in Incident Management on the Project settings page in your ITSM project.
Alerts are sent to responders when:
  • Alerts are enabled in the project
  • Responders have set up their contact methods
👇 Click the icons below to explore configuring responder alerts for Incident Management.
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The responder alerts screen of project settings in Jira Service Management. Responder alerts has been toggled.

Create and manage an operations team

Operations in Jira Service Management serves as a centralized hub where teams can execute and coordinate their operational tasks, ensuring the smooth functioning of their IT environment.
An operations team in Jira Service Management is set up to take advantage of on-call schedules, escalation policies, and more. The team members own and are familiar with a particular service.
Below are the high-level steps for creating an operations team:
  1. Create a team
  2. Launch your team’s operations
  3. Set the team's on-call schedule
  4. Set escalation policies
  5. Set routing rules

Each user in the team must set their personal notification preferences.

👇 Click the boxes below to review the details in each step for creating a service owner team.

Notify your incident response team

Jira Service Management can notify designated individuals in a variety of methods according to their own notification settings.
When an incident is marked as a major incident in Jira Service Management, an alert or multiple alerts are automatically generated. These alerts then send a notification to the on-call personnel within the team responsible for the related service. Notifications are delivered based on the recipients' notification preferences.
👉 For example: An incident is marked as a major incident in the project. This creates an alert, which triggers a notification to Annie, who's currently on-call in the on-call schedule. She's set up her notification preferences to receive a text on her mobile phone, so she receives the text notification on her mobile phone.
👇 Annie clicks a link in the text to Acknowledge the notification so the alerts will stop.
ALT=A conceptual illustration of the chain of actions in notifying the incident response team. A Major incident occurs, which sends an alert as a Text notification to Annie’s mobile phone.

Use contact methods to add alert notifications

Each user can add or modify their contact methods any time via the Notification Settings:
  1. In the upper-right corner of Jira, click the Settings icon (represented by a gear).
  2. Select Personal Jira settings, then Notifications.
  3. On the side bar, under Notifications, select Alerts to configure your personal settings for alert notifications.
👇Click the numbered icons to view the steps in Jira Service Management.
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The Alert notifications page of Personal settings. On the left sidebar, Alerts is highlighted. The Settings button (represented by a gear icon) is highlighted in the top navigation bar, and the settings menu appears below.
Jira Service Management offers four contact methods that you can use for alert notifications:
  • Email
  • SMS
  • Voice phone calls
  • Mobile push notifications
👇 Click the numbered icons below to explore how to set up your contact methods.
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The Alert notifications page of Personal settings. Contact methods is visible on the right, where you can add contact methods for email, SMS, and voice. You can also scan a QR code for a mobile push.

Set up your notification rules

After each team member has added their contact details, they can customize how they receive notifications based on each alert action so Jira Service Management knows how to notify them correctly.
This prevents alert fatigue and ensures critical alerts aren’t missed.
👉 For example: In the screenshot, the user will be notified immediately via email and SMS for each new alert. They've edited the third notification method, so they'll be notified by voice five minutes after a new alert. (The default is to use all three methods for immediate notification of a new alert.)
The notification rules screen in Jira Service Management. A new alert is being created. There are options for how to alert via email and SMS.

Suppose you want all users to have the same notification settings. In that case, Team admins can set up central notification templates to define shared notification settings that apply to a user role, such as admin, user, etc.

Respond to a major incident

👇Watch this video to see a response to a major incident in Jira Service Management.
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