Automating ticket assignment to a group in JSM

[Sebastian Santoyo]

We are looking to automate ticket assignment in Jira Service Management, but we found a limitation: Jira only allows assignment to a specific user, not to a group.

This creates a practical issue:

-If we automate assignment to a fixed user, there is a risk that the person is on vacation or unavailable.

-As a result, tickets may pile up without being attended, causing SLA breaches.

We have considered leaving the assignment manual as a healthier option, but we would like to validate with the community if there are best practices or recommended alternatives for this scenario.

Specific questions:

1. What is the best practice for handling assignment when the request should go to a team or group rather than a single person?

2. Are there any native JSM features that allow rotation (round robin) or balanced assignment across team members?

3. What alternatives have other teams applied to make sure tickets do not remain orphaned during vacations or absences?

Any guidance or experience would be greatly appreciated.

[Mikael Sandberg]

Currently as you have noticed it is not possible to assign to a team. There is a suggestion to be able to do this, check out JSDCLOUD-106.

At my previous job we used the on-call schedule in Operations to assign tickets to our agents,  which I wrote about in this article. Trundl makes an app that is similar in functionality, Smart Assignments & Rotations and there are other apps in the Marketplace that can reassign a work item if the assignee is OOO.

Another workaround could be to utilize Assets and set a custom field to the team that should be assigned to the request.

Teams are changing and you can now associate a team with a group, so you could set the team field based on membership and then organize your queues around teams.

The question still exist, if you assign a ticket to a team, how do you know who on the team is working on it? That is why Jira is using a single assignee, and if you need to divide the work into smaller chunks for other people to do that chunk then you use sub-tasks to do that.