Ways to implement approval of time estimation

Question

Currently our process for cost estimation looks like this:

we create estimations for the workload that is to be expected, send an issue into a generic "Waiting for customer"-step with the request for approval (this doesn’t yet us real jira approval) and after the customer writes back "yes X hours’ time estimation approved" the manual fill a special field on the issue.

I want to automate this process, since it happens too often that once a customer approves my colleagues and I just start working, and do not follow the part with changing the field on the issue. That might lead to some issues in the aftermath, especially with complex and longer tickets where you would need to read 20 or more comments to determine how much time is actually approved by the customer (in case we had to reorder time later on especially)

Since the customers usually do not stick to just one phrase for telling that they approve the estimate, it is a bit hard to create an automation to do this automatically.

Recently I started thinking about using the approval mechanism of service desk in our favor. The basic raw idea would be to fill the field, let us call it "total estimate" with a value, send the issue into approval step and depending on the either approving or declining simply just stick with the value, or role back to the old value.
However, I have no idea how to make that happen, since I do not know how to access history data with the automation.

Did any of you already face the same challenge and might be able to share some insights and best practices on this?

Jacob Kock Plinius · Answer

Hi @Earl McCutcheon

It seems that you have answered my questions all but one. What if get into a situation where we are about to exceed the number of approve hours? It is easy to notify the assignee to take action, but how should the process be?. Would it be possible to set the status to "Waiting for approval" and simply repeat the process as the number of hours go up? I am probably overthinking it, but hopefully I am.... Please enlighten

Earl McCutcheon · Answer

Hi @Lucas Steinmetz ,

You could set up something like the following example to achieve this using Automation Rules and a custom workflow.

First in the workflow build in a approve or deny transition stage at an approval status exposing the transition to the customer portal in the transition settings.  The screenshot below is a super basic layout but you would want follow the same theory to have a approval step for the customer to Approve to go to your working section of the workflow, and a deny step to go back to the information gathering section:

Next Create two Fields,  a Suggested Estimate and a Approved estimate in my examples below i named them

* AA_TEST_Estimate
* 
AA_TEST_Approved_Time

These will be used during the automation process one for the value you are suggesting and on approval will be copied to and set to the  the other field as your verified value,  I recomend that the Estimate field be added to the transition screen only so that it can only be adjusted when entering the status, and the verified value field be added to the view screen so it is visible when working on the request

On the transition that leads to your Approval status set either a Validator to require a value be entered into the Estimate, so that this cannot be left blank during the transition, like this:

Next go to the Project Automation and we will create a few different automation rules

The First one will automate the response to the customer letting them know about the estimate using smart values something like this, noting to deselect the prevent duplicates (so a secondary approval can be sen it the user initially denies) and to expand the more options and select the checkbox for "Share with Customer":

Then two more rules to automate the value being approved or denied, one rule when issue is transitioned from waiting for approval to the approval step of in progress that copies the value from estimate to approved

The second rule from "waiting for approval" to Deny and return back to the previous status and clear out the estimate so that a new one can be entered.

With this setup the user creates the issue, and when you transition to the waiting for approval status, the user is automatically notified of the estimate, with instructions of what the next steps are and would look like something this in the customer portal:

Approval will copy the value over to the Approved time field on verification and deny will clear the field, requiring that you enter a new value to resubmit a new approval value.

Hope this info helps and I am pretty sure this will meet your needs, but let me know if this is what you are looking for or if I missed the make.

Regards,
Earl