How do I manage treatment activities?

Owned by David Pinn
Last updated: May 30, 2022 by Craig Schwarze [ProjectBalm]
2 min read

This page applies to Risk Register for Jira Data Center and Jira Server

Risk Register for Jira Server lets you specify the general treatment approach that you intend to take: Accept, Avoid, Mitigate, Transfer; and gives you a space to record some details about your treatment plan in plain text. In addition to your plain-text treatment description, you might also like to track the individual activities that comprise your treatment plan. You can do that by creating individual Jira issues for each of your treatment activities, and linking those issues back to the risk.

On risks and treatments

Risks are generally regarded as separate things from the treatments that are applied to them. A treatment is an activity-like issue; it involves an assignee expending effort to achieve a goal, and then it's finished. Risks have a workflow related to identification, analysis, determining treatment, and eventual closure. Although you might be tempted to assign time and resources to risks, it's best practice to create separate tasks to flesh out your treatment plans.


You can take one of two approaches: sub-tasks, or issue linking.

Sub-tasks

You can use sub-tasks to represent risk activities. With this approach you can define a rule to prevent a risk being marked Complete until its treatment activities have been done. To learn about this approach, read our blog article, "Using sub-tasks with risks".


Issue linking

You can link treatments to risks via a custom issue link type. This approach has the advantage of flexibility; your treatment tasks can be linked to multiple risks, and can even reside in separate projects. An upcoming release of Risk Register for Jira Server will set up the link type for you; in the meantime, a Jira Administrator can do the following:

  1. Visit Administration → Issues→ Issue linking
  2. Create an issue link type named 'Treatment', with outward link description 'treats' and inward link description 'is treated by'.

Now you can create treatment tasks like this:

  1. Create a Jira issue of any type you like; a Task perhaps.
  2. View the detail of the new issue.
  3. Click More → Link
  4. Select 'treats' and the risk to which you want to link this treatment. For example, in the snippet below, we're indicating that our new task treats the risk identified as ABC-1.
  5. Click Link.

You'll now have a bi-directional link between the new treatment task and the risk that it treats. Navigating back to the risk, you'll see the linked treatment: