Issue management

In public relations, issue management is the process used to align organizational activities and stakeholder expectations.

Issue managers work in government affairs, legal affairs, public affairs and regulatory compliance.

In business, Issue Management refers to the discipline and process of managing business issues and usually implies using technology to electronically automate the process. Electronic issue management has gathered steam as a business and technology movement in recent years as mid-sized and large businesses have realized the advantage of implementing systems to manage, document, and track work.

Early examples of issue management systems appeared in the late 1980s with customer ticketing systems. Businesses that implemented these systems were often addressing customer complaints and needed a method to document, track, and manage to complaints to successful resolution. These systems evolved and with the widespread introduction of Information Technology departments that further pushed issue management systems with advent of 'help desk' systems.

Today, issue management systems are commonly used by product development companies to manage requests, changes to products, reported defects, etc.

A typical issue workflow might look like this with regard to issue state: [issue submitted] -> [open] -> [in evaluation] -> [in work] -> [in test] -> [closed] Where the [in test] and [in work] phases often loop.

A typical issue management electronic workflow might look like this with regard to roles:
1. An issue is submitted by a customer, salesperson, engineer, or test engineer, often via a web browser.
2. The issue management system logs the issue and relocates the issue to a predefined representative's inbox.
3. The representative evaluates the issue and assigns it to an appropriate employee.
4. Work is done on the issue, documented in the system, and closed.
5. In most processes, the originator is notified that the issue has been resolved.
Any issue management process in which there are well defined inputs and outputs can be automated electronically.

There are both private and open source solutions available to companies interested in implementing issue management.

Unfortunately, open source issue management systems are not making good ProgresS catching up with the solutions available privately. At the time of this writing they have not incorporated important system features related to project integration. Specifically, open source solutions haven't Delivered features that contextualize issues as a part of an overall project, incorporate dependent and transitional fields, and support multiple workflows within a single interface.

See also

  • List of project management software
  • Comparison of issue tracking systems

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