How do I enable approval for Changes in Jira Service Management?

Question

I am doing a trial of Jira Service Management. I can't find clear, simple instructions anywhere on how to enable Approvals for Change requests submitted to the portal. Once Changes are submitted to my test portal, there doesn't seem to be any way out of the box to move them to an Approved state.

I find this pretty confusing. The sales pitch to me on Jira Service Management was that it "just works" out of the box.

Also, is anyone else finding the Atlassian Assist app to be borderline useless with MS Teams?

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

What type of change is it? Where in the workflow are you? If you selected Standard change or Emergency change it will move the change to Awaiting implementation, but if you used the Normal change transition it will end up in the Review status.

You would have to create a service and add the approver group if you have not changed the Authorize step to use a Jira field and Approvers instead.

Yes, you can set a default Approvers group, just go to Project settings > Request types > Changes and add the Approvers group to the request form, hide it and set the default group. The other option would be to use automation to set the default group.

What will happen when the change moves to Authorize is that an email will be sent to each approver, if there are no approvers that email will sent as soon as you set the approvers.

Jordan Pritchard_jxkikf · Answer

Thank you! The issue I am seeing on my end is that I don't see any options to actually move the Change to an approved state. Do I have to add an approver group manually to each change? Is there a way to simply set a default change approver group in the service management project and then that group will automatically get alerted when a change is requiring approval?

Mikael Sandberg · Answer

Forgot to add that by default the approvers are populated based on the service that has been selected to be affected by the change. If you do not use services you would have to change the Authorize status so that the Approvers field is used instead, that way you can control how approves it.

You can learn move about change management in JSM in this getting started guide.