If you manage Jira or Jira Service Management (JSM), you already know the feeling. Peak vacation season is right around the corner, and right before the out-of-office (OOO) auto-replies switch on, the messages start rolling into your inbox:
- "Hey, I’m heading out for two weeks starting tomorrow. Can you route all my change approvals to Sarah while I’m gone?"
- "Mark is already on a flight and we have an urgent hardware request stuck on his approval. Can an admin push this through?"
- "Hey, I got back from PTO three days ago—why is David still getting my budget sign-offs?"
In a couple of previous articles, we looked at why every approval workflow needs a delegation strategy and compared the different ways teams try to activate delegation in Jira.
With the holidays approaching, that theoretical problem is about to become very real. Because in Jira, it only takes a single approver going OOO to bring an entire workflow to a halt.
Stop Rewiring Jira for Temporary Absences
Most teams spend a lot of time building clean, reliable approval processes—pulling managers from JSM Assets, using Jira Automation to route sign-offs, or relying on Jira Groups for Change Advisory Board (CAB) reviews.
The headache starts the moment one of those approvers takes time off.
Suddenly, a Jira admin gets pulled in to temporarily swap a name in Assets or tweak an Automation rule—and then has to remember to change it back when that person returns.
Your workflows, automation rules, and Assets schemas are meant to define who is responsible for a process. They shouldn't have to be edited every time someone books a flight.
When you decouple your vacation coverage from your workflow configuration, Jira admins stop acting as human routers—and teams stop losing days waiting on someone who is offline.
That’s the exact idea why my team build Approver Delegation for Jira. It adds a self-service delegation layer on top of your existing Jira and JSM setup so approvals keep moving without anyone touching a single workflow, automation rule, or Assets object.
1. True Self-Service (Even for Portal-Only Approvers)
Instead of DMing a Jira admin on Friday at 4:30 PM, approvers schedule their own out-of-office coverage in seconds by picking their Start Date, End Date, and Delegatee. When their trip ends, the delegation wraps up automatically—no admin reminders required.
And because in many companies the people approving budgets, HR requests, or vendor access aren't daily Jira users—they live in the JSM Customer Portal—they can manage their own delegations right from the Servicedesk under My Delegations, without needing an agent license or admin help.
Image 1: Jira user adding his own delegation
2. No Ticket Left Behind: Catching "In-Flight" Approvals
One of the biggest traps when someone goes OOO is what happens to the tickets that were already sitting in Waiting for Approval before they logged off. Even if you change an Automation rule or an Assets object on Friday afternoon, those existing tickets stay stuck on the person on the beach.
With Approver Delegation for Jira, scheduled delegations can automatically sweep through open work items already awaiting approval and hand them over to the delegatee right away.
And if someone isn't taking a full week off, but just needs to hand over a couple of specific requests before stepping out for an afternoon? They can open My Approvals, see every item waiting on them across projects in one place, and reassign individual (or bulk) approvals on the spot.
Image 2: Re-assign an approver for a specific work item
3. A Safety Net for the "Already on the Plane" Moments
Self-service handles almost every planned holiday absence. But what about unplanned sick leave, or the director who simply forgets to set up their coverage before heading to the airport?
Instead of an admin digging through JQL and manually editing fields across dozens of tickets—or worse, modifying a workflow rule to bypass them—an admin can jump into the central All Delegations dashboard and set up a time-bound delegation on behalf of that user in seconds.
Plus, every single substitution—who it was originally assigned to, who stepped in, and when—is recorded in a dedicated Audit Trail. Your workflows stay untouched, your SLAs stay green, and your compliance auditors get a clean record of why Sarah approved Mark's change request while he was away.
Image 3: Audit trail of Approval delegations
Ready for the Holiday OOO Wave?
If your pre-holiday routine still involves editing JSM Assets, tweaking Jira Automation rules, or keeping a spreadsheet of who is covering for whom so you remember to switch them back, there is a much easier way to save your admin team's time.
If you want to explore how it works in detail, you can take a look at Approver Delegation for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace.
