Allow Disabling or Scoping of Playbooks in Jira Service Management Cloud

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Team,

First off, I’d like to share my appreciation for the recently released Playbooks feature in Jira Service Management. This capability brings structure and automation to issue resolution—providing teams with clear, standardized processes and improving response consistency. It’s a strong step forward for IT and operations teams looking to scale their service delivery with best practices.

That said, I’d like to raise a feature improvement request that would help organizations better manage the adoption and visibility of Playbooks across diverse service teams.

The Current Situation

• Playbooks are automatically enabled and accessible in all Jira Service Management Cloud projects.

• There is currently no option to globally disable or restrict visibility of Playbooks across the site or organization.

While Playbooks are highly valuable in incident management, DevOps, and ITSM workflows, they may not be applicable for all teams—such as those handling HR, finance, legal, or procurement requests. In these contexts, Playbooks can introduce:

• UI clutter and unnecessary elements in project settings

• Confusion for agents who do not require SOP-style task flows

• Inconsistency with simplified service desk use cases

Proposed Enhancements

To improve administrative control and user experience, I propose the following enhancement:

1. Global Admin Toggle
   Provide a site-level or org-level setting that allows Atlassian Cloud administrators to disable Playbooks entirely for their environment if the feature is not needed.

2. Role-Based Access Control
   Allow admins to define which roles or user groups can view, create, or trigger Playbooks. This ensures the functionality is limited to teams that truly benefit from structured automation.

Why This Matters

Giving administrators control over Playbooks would:

• Keep the interface clean and relevant for non-technical service teams.

• Align with Atlassian's core values of flexibility and customization.

• Avoid feature fatigue and reduce training overhead for users who do not need incident response tooling.

This small configuration option could significantly improve user adoption and satisfaction across varied departments.

Thank you to the Atlassian team for your continued investment in improving Jira Service Management. Playbooks are a fantastic feature for the right teams—and with a bit more control, they could integrate even more seamlessly into the diverse ways JSM is used across organizations.

Looking forward to hearing others' feedback and insights from the community!

Regards,

Sami Ahmed Shaik.

[Genae]

I completely agree with you and thank you for the thorough write up. In Sandbox, Playbooks could be toggled off in Project Settings > Features; I was expecting to see the same when implemented in Prod and had marked my calendar to disable it right away for all the reasons you list.

[Stephan Hannach]

It's interesting. In some sites, it is possible to disable in Project Settings > Features.

In others, it is not.

Also, the toggle for suggestion of automation rules is not on every site visible.

[Kai Becker]

Can confirm that. I have sites that have both toggles under features but on of our customer sites does not.