Most Impactful Jira or Confluence Automation You’ve Implemented?

[Prasanna Ravichandran]

What is the most impactful Jira or Confluence automation you have implemented that delivered real results? Please share your success story. 

[JD Smith]

When we do a major release there is a (massive) standard set of Epics, Tasks, and checklists that track all the launch activities and coordination. It used to take one person a day to set up. 

Now they press a button, fill in the product and the version in the popup, and it's done in a couple minutes.

[Suraj Ravindra Gurav]

I created a Cross-project Jira automation, which copies RAG Status from multiple Epics (across different projects) to a specifically linked Key Results on a different project, and apply a custom logic to decide ultimate RAG Status of Key Result based on status of Linked Epics. So the project, which has this Key Result is powering Power BI dashboard, which gives leadership team an high level (and also details if needed) view on status of company's strategic priorities.

So, now every person on different project teams just takes care of RAG Status of their own Epics and everything is communicated straight upto Leadership, in really executive-friendly way. No visibility and transparency chaos.

[SHA]

Honestly, the best one I ever set up was the "Jira-GitHub Sync." It was a game-changer because it finally stopped Jira from being a chore for the devs.

​The Win: "The Invisible Update"

​The team hated context-switching. They’d be deep in the zone, finish a feature, and then forget to move the Jira card for three days. It drove management crazy and made our velocity charts look like a joke.

​What I did:

I hooked up Jira to our GitHub repo so the code drove the status.

​Create a branch with the ticket ID? Jira moves it to In Progress.

​Open a Pull Request? It jumps to In Review and tags the reviewers.

​Merge to Main? It hits Done and pings the QA lead in Slack.

​The Result

​We basically deleted manual updates. The devs stayed in their IDEs, and the board stayed 100% accurate in real-time. It saved about 2 hours of "chasing status" per person, per week.

[Arkadiusz Wroblewski]

I implemented cascading fields based on Assets with dependency relations and automated backward auto-fill.

Use case? Especially for our DevOps teams, there was a need in Jira Cloud to track time and then book it into Navision.

I used an export from Navision, mapped the data into Assets in Jira Cloud, and then created custom fields with cascading dependencies. I also added one extra field that fills the hierarchy top-down From Projektstruktur to Customer With Automation and Lookups when the Projektstruktur information is known. On top of that, ScriptRunner helped me clone those values to newly created subtasks.

It’s safer in real time and a great addition for our teams, because well-defined and properly mapped Assets are much easier to maintain and update.

[Juan Carlos Pin]

Previously, in our Onboarding of new employees, emails and excel sheets were scattered all across the IT dept.

Now, a new Onboarding ticket makes subtasks for each member depending on a multiselect list of required app permissions.

Next step: Make Assets as a single source of truth of which app has which user and automate its status when created, modified, or deactivated. 

[Julia Foden]

In a previous job I built an Access Request process. If a person wanted access to a system they created a ticket, selecting the system from a dropdown and selecting their manager from a user picker. Automation then edited the summary to "Access Request FOR <person> TO <system>", assigned to the manager, and added a comment tagging the manager asking them to approve via the workflow.

When approved by the manager, Automation would fill a group-picker field with the group that managed access to the selected system and send an email to that group. 

When a member of that group had provided access and transitioned the ticket, Automation would tag the reporter telling them that access was provided and to create a new ticket if they needed access to something else.

Not the most complex automation (that came later when I linked this with other processes!) but probably the most impactful in terms of optimising a high-usage process, minimising the amount of clicks and typing for everyone involved.