Change Management

[Jeff Martin]

I am 100% new to Service Desk and we are looking to start off using Service Desk as a Change Management tool. I am wanting to setup an approval process that depending on the Change Category (ie. Server, Network, Security) the change ticket is required to be approved by the Manager of that division within the organization. I found several articles about creating approvers, etc. but none of the information in the articles seems to be matching what I'm seeing in Service Desk.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @Jeff Martin

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

per your description, I understand you want to configure an approval step for your change management issues if some specific fields of the issue meet certain criteria. Is that correct?

Indeed, Jira service desk can be easily configured with an Approval step, which can be implemented by following the steps of the documentation below:

Set up approvals 

The real challenge here is to configure your workflow in a way that the approval should be applied or not depending on the value selected for the fields you need. I believe there are two ways to achieve it:

1 - Instead of using fields to define whenever the approval step should be implemented or not, use two different issue types to define it: Change with approval and Change.

This is the easiest way to achieve what you need and the default option with Jira service desk, where you will configure two different workflows for your issue types, one with the approval steps and another without it.

This is definitely the best option if the agents implementing the Change management know from the very beginning if their changes will require approval or not.

2 - Configure two ways in the same workflow (one that requires approval and the other does not), using the Workflow condition called value field to hide the transition with no approval required when the fields do not match a specific value.

This option will allow you to use the same issue type to define whenever the approval step should be implemented or not based in the fields you created, however, it will require a workflow customization a little more complicated than the first option provided.

Let us know if you have any specific questions about the steps provided.