What is the best field configuration option for timezone in a Jira submission?

[alex.webber]

We have date/time and are looking to get timezone included too for our support submissions - is there a template for this with a pre-defined set of tz options?

[Curt Holley]

Hey @alex.webber 
I've just been reading through this as I've been asked a similar question and was looking for ideas.
1. I'd be interested to know what you have ended up doing as your solution.

2. I wondered if using a location field would have made sense in your scenario? 
As in, ask them where they are and work out the timezone from that.
Ultimately i would use Assets to create all your known locations and have a timezone attribute then use that with automation to convert the relevant date/time field(s) to reflect the right date/time.

[alex.webber]

We ended up using a date/time AND timezone field in Jira @Curt Holley (which was implemented via our Jira Developer FWIW)

Ex. below

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Hi Alex,

It depends a bit on what you want from the timezone data, and what you are trying to use it for. Is it intended to be a list of timezones to select when raising an issue that then feeds into a report of some sort?  Or is it going to inform your queues and SLAs.  Or maybe help choose an assignee?

Also, how are you going to get accuracy from your end users?  Most are likely to ignore it, or not understand why it might be important, and so leave it blank or accept a default.

Would it be better to Automate it where it needs to be used?  Have something that looks at the current time and sets it automatically, or (and I'm not sure this can be done on Cloud), look at the timezone settings of the user and set that.

[alex.webber]

Thanks @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- It's intended to be a list of timezones for customers to select when raising an issue that then feeds into our support form + subsequent submissions by customers. (Also happy for this to be a free text field with an indication of how to indicate timezones if that's easier + not a templated option by Jira)

We're not too concerned about this being an optional field but imagine it will help with further specifics about incoming support issues + we will also prioritize the associated date/time occurred field(s) a little more so these are one of the first fields to be populated by the customer once we have a go-forward plan here.

[alex.webber]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- Thoughts on our response above?

Eager to get this included and wondering if it would be easier just to create a free text field if a specific field for date/time/timezone is not available from the template options...

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I'm sorry, I missed the comment in January.

But it clarified everything I was not getting.  A timezone field would be of massive help to you - it can be fed into your SLAs if nothing else (raised at 4am in the UK is different to raised at 4am in Singapore), but I can see it being really useful for reporting as well.

I would advise letting your customers leave it blank, with a note that if they do, support might be a bit slower because your team are a bit fuzzy on how old something is (albeit the worst case is 23 hours out).

But there is no time-zone field type available.  If you haven't got anything that can extract the time zone from a user's settings and automate it, then the best you can do is add a select-list with options that look like time zones.  

I would add that now.  But keep it simple - my country is almost entirely within the GMT time zone, but annoyingly uses the now useless daylight-saving times so for half of every year, we get lumped with the utterly pointless BST instead of GMT.  Argh.  It's a massive pain even within Europe, let alone my miserable ability to understand anything beyond "most of the EU is one hour ahead of GMT"

I would love Atlassian to implement a timezone field, just for the baseline info if nowt else.

[alex.webber]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- No worries re. the responded - just grateful that you responded in the first instance!

So, we're not looking for something in terms of SLA calculations, just for customers to complete the timezone field if/when they can so we know what exact time they're referring to when they specify a date + time as well, from the date/time picker.

Hope I'm making more sense here! Also, we're leaning towards this just being a short-text field at this point with this extra blurb above it to prompt users to use the correct timezone abbreviation.

Use timezone short code via https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/

Let's see how this rolls! (Hopefully some folks actually fill it out!)

Ps. I liked the idea of the pre-defined drop-down field, however the way this template field works in Jira implies that I'd have to add every single abbreviation individually which would take a while! (So deferring to the cutting corner solution here instead)

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yep, the SLA thing can be useful to some, but just knowing what timezone a customer is in is intrinsically vastly useful.  

I am utterly dreadful at translating them, but it is always good to know what range of times a customer might be most comfortable with.  

You are making perfect sense.  Whilst I think most people are generally similarly bad at the calculations I'm dreadful at, I do think most humans can at least name their own time zone.

I am interested in how your text field works out.  I would guess that most, if not all, of your people put a useful value in to it for the higher priority stuff, and if not too important, some will leave it blank.

A drop-down might make it a bit easier, especially if you're going to automate stuff, but it could be quite confusing at times.  If you went for that, I'd only add options for the areas that your people are active in, and I want to go back to the "look at the user's profile for their region" (for me for example, my base is GMT (the same as UTC), but only until we bin off BST which is a massive pain in the neck)