Support your ITSM team with space configurations
10 min
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Organize your team’s work with work categories, portal groups, and queues
- Automate your team’s work with workflow transitions, approvals, and Jira automation
- Keep your team updated with notifications and escalation policies
Organize with work categories, portal groups, and queues
Enable work categories to access the right space features
Work categories group space features by different uses. Space admins should enable work categories relevant to their team to access related features.
👉 For example: Enabling the Problem management work category provides features relevant to problem management, such as:
- Problem logging for post-incident reviews
- Root-cause investigation workflows
- Incident grouping and linking
👇 Click the tabs below to review examples where teams might want to enable or disable work categories.
The Gandalph team is an incident response team. They use an ITSM space for incident management only, excluding change management and other features. Incident requests can access the incident timeline, alerts, and on-call scheduling.
👇 You can enable and disable work categories in space settings.
Categorize similar request types using portal groups
Portal groups categorize similar request types so they are easier for customers to find on the customer portal and easier for agents to address. Request types that don’t have a group don’t appear in the portal.
👉 For example: A space admin could create a portal group for login and account requests for new hires.
👇 Here’s what that would look like in space settings.
Configure queues to organize tickets
Queues help agents prioritize and complete work, staying ahead of work items before they become significant problems. Space admins can create queues based on criteria like SLA, request type, assignee, organization, and fields.
👉 For example: You could create queues that:
- Only include tickets assigned to each agent on your team
- Highlight P1 incidents that have breached their first response SLA
- Show only requests with a due date of next week to classify less urgent requests
Work with your team to find out what queues they need, then name the queues using language the team will understand.
Automate with workflow transitions, approvals, and rules
Use workflow transitions to empower customers
You can configure workflows so that customers can simply initiate workflow transitions by updating their portal requests. Customer transitions in the portal do behave differently than other workflow transitions. This includes:
- Screens don't display in the portal. You can set a resolution for work items that are transitioned in the portal.
- Transitioning a work item from the portal ignores validators for the transition.
👉 For example: When a customer responds to an agent’s question, the ticket will be transitioned from Waiting for Customer to Waiting for Support.
👉 Another example: When a ticket is approved from the portal, it will transition from Waiting for Approval to Approved or to Rejected, depending on the response from the approver.
Add automatic approvals to tickets
You can include one or multiple approval steps on a workflow and direct the approvals to specific users, roles, or groups. Approvals apply to specific actions, changes, or requests in a space.
👉 For example: An agent might require approval for requests for travel, new hardware, and subscriptions.
Space admins and Jira admins can add an approval step to define:
- When a ticket requires approval
- Who needs to approve the ticket, as well as how many approvers each step needs
- What happens when the ticket is approved or declined
Only Jira admins can define approvers for a request type or add an approval step to a workflow.
If you want to view the steps on how it can be done visit this page.
Set up rules to automate repetitive tasks
ITSM spaces include several templates with pre-defined automation rules. Space admins can create new rules or copy them from other spaces.
👇 Click the tabs below to read potential automation use cases.
Use an automation rule to auto-assign new tickets to the right team or agent based on factors like work type and priority.
Keep your team updated with notifications and on-call rotations
Configure internal notifications
Internal notifications send agents and space members emails based on activities occurring in their spaces.
👇 Click the tabs below to explore examples of user requests that you can solve with notifications.
You can create an automation rule to email the agent when a ticket is assigned to them.
Configure on-call rotations
You can use on-call features in your service spaces to create on-call teams structured by department, function, or other criteria.
👉 For example: The Alpha team follows a daily on-call rotation for handling P1 incidents on the customer-facing website. Jira Service Management notifies team members at the start of their shift. If a customer reports a P1 incident, the service space will assign it to the team member currently on-call.
Typically, alerts go to multiple users or groups based on their notification preferences. You can also configure escalations to alert responders according to a set order. When you link an escalation to an alert, its escalation rules notify responders once the specified time elapses and the alert's condition is met.
👉 For example: You could configure an escalation policy so that it alerts users in this order:
- IT support team
- If the IT support team doesn’t acknowledge the ticket in the defined time, escalate to the IT manager.
- If the IT manager doesn’t acknowledge the ticket within the defined time, escalate to the IT director.
- If all levels fail to respond, escalate to the CTO.
To ensure that users receive the alert, you can use multiple notification channels, such as email, alerts, and notifications.