Guideline: Managing Issues
This guideline describes an approach for issues management.
Relationships
Main Description

Issues are concerns that may adversely affect the project. They must be addressed in a timely manner before they turn into bigger problems. Issues are often found during a review, meeting, assessment or project retrospective.

Types of issues

Generally Issues can be categorized into three types:

  • Defect - a problem or bug that impairs product functionality
  • Improvement - an additional item that is filed to enhance an existing feature
  • Feature - a new feature added to the product

Issues management

A standard issues management process includes the following steps:

  1. Submit - issues are identified and submitted or documented
  2. Investigate - understand each issue
    1. Define the issue. Identify the unsettled matter for each item.
    2. Determine the impact of the issue on schedule, cost, or conflict with committed work products.
    3. Assign a priority level to each issue. Higher attention should be paid to significant issues.
  3. Solve - fix or mitigate the issue. Repeat this step until the issue is resolved.
    1. Assign issue to responsible person. Track as a work item in the backlog.
    2. Maintain issue log. Document the findings or solution to the issue.
    3. Monitor issue status. An issue should not remain unresolved in the system for a long time. Significant issues must not remain unassigned to a responsible person.
  4. Review - test or verify to ensure the issue is fixed. If the issue is not fixed, the team should re-investigate.

Issue status categories

Typical issue status categories include:

  • Open - an issue can be opened in two forms
    • New - a newly opened issue
    • Reopened - an issue that has been resolved but is now reopened
  • Resolved - there are four resolution cases
    • Deferred - in some cases, low priority issues can be postponed to the next iteration or until further notice
    • Mitigated - the issue is resolved by fixing or mitigating the concern
    • Duplicate - the issue is resolved because it is overlaps with or is similar to another issue
    • Invalid - the issue is resolved because the filed item is not an issue but it is mistakenly documented as an issue.

It is very important for the project manager to monitor the status of each issue, revisit it at least once a week, and ensure it is managed to closure.

The team maintains an issue log and reviews an issue management report in order to analyze project performance for future process improvement.

Various issue management tools can support the team in issue submission, parent-child issue relationship identification, issue tracking, issue prioritization, task assignment, and performance statistics.