automation to know when a team member is out of office so that it can assign the back-up services

Question

Jira automation to know when a team member is out of office so that it can assign the back-up service owner to a Jira ticket in those instances:

Services:                 Service Owner:                 Service Back up owner 
Facebook               Employee A                       Employee B
Gmail                     Employee A                       Employee B
Twitter                   Employee A                       Employee B
 
Example: 
Ticket raise from employee requesting access to Facebook
But
Employee A (Service Owner) is out office then ticket will redirect to
Employee  B (Service Back-up owner)

Thomas Chung_bgmiwu · Answer

Out of Office Assistant is probably the most direct answer for automatic reassignment. It does exactly what you described.
One thing to think about: reassignment is reactive (ticket already got assigned to the wrong person). If you can get team leads to check who's available before assigning during triage, you avoid the problem entirely. Some teams use a shared calendar, some use Marketplace apps with availability views.

Jaime Capitel (resolution) · Answer

Hi  ,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

The functionality that you're looking for is essentially the reason that we built the Out of Office Assistant for Jira Cloud some years back at resolution.

With it, you can build Out of Office rules such that specific requests are reassigned to a backup owner (we call that role "coverer"), when the standard owner is out of office.

Let's make an example:

* You have automation rules that uses a JQL as the condition for auto assigning certain requests to User A.
* As per your example, let's make these services Facebook, Gmail, and Twitter. Then your JQL will probably be something like:

"Project="nameofproject" AND Services IN ('facebook', 'twitter',' gmail')"

* Let's assume that you don't actually want the same user as the delegate service owner for all three services, since User B knows a lot about facebook, but doesn't even have admin access to twitter or gmail.
* In that case, User A can build one reassignment rule per service with Out of Office Assistant. All they have to do is create a custom JQL filter for each of those rules, like this:

Essentially, once built into Out of Office, it would look something like this:

* Note that I've created open ended rules and deactivated them. Now, every team User A goes on leave, he only has to click on the three toggles to activate the reassignments. When he's back, he can click on them again to switch them off
* If User A is sick and can't access Jira, an Admin or project Admin can activate the three rules for him

I hope that something like this works for you! Let me know if you have any additional questions. You can browse the product documentation for additional info.

Ash Yadav · Answer

Hi @jose.fuentes

This can be achieved in a number of ways, I'm going to assume you want to do this out of the box without any plugins/apps?

One of those ways is to have your OOO employees to make themselves unassignable in Jira.

This might not be the most practical method as it would involve temporarily removing Service Owner from the a group that has the Assignable user permissions.

Then the automation will automatically re-assign any unassigned issues to service owner B.

See below as an example:

The second way I'd approach this is to have an SLA for time to first response, and if it's breached (let's say 1 hour from issue creation), then it will automatically assign the issue to service owner B.

The rules themselves are very simple and I would personally flesh them out a bit more depending on what conditions or checks you'd like to have before re-assigning the issue.

Other than the above, I'm sure there are many other ways you can achieve this via automation however there is no straight forward, out of the box OOO functionality that would have a backup component lead. Feel free to check out the marketplace :)

All the best,

Ash