Best practice for notifying targeted users in a shared Jira Service Desk project?

[Bethany Glismann]

Hello,

I have several teams sharing a single Service Desk project. Each team is responsible for one or more of my project's Request Types - I have a queue set up for each team to monitor. The teams would like to be notified when a ticket is submitted matching a Request Type they are responsible for, but not for tickets that are of Request Types they are not responsible for. So in other words, they are only interested in notifications for their queue, not the project at large. Sometimes they want this notification to go to a single user/"Queue Manager", and sometimes they want it to go to a group of users.

First, before getting into the notifications of it all, is this a "standard" implementation of Service Desk, or does it make more sense to split the teams into separate projects? My instinct was to keep them together as all Request Types support a single product, even though each team sharing the Service Desk handles a different capability of the product. Since the users submitting our tickets are typically entry level, non technical staff such as call center representatives, keeping the portal and customer experience as simple as possible is pretty important. But as I play with notifications and other settings, it feels as if JSD is designed with a single team per Service Desk in mind. 

All right, on to "notifications" (in quotations because I don't necessarily want or need to solve this via the Notification Scheme. 

• As a quick temporary solution, I set up automations to create an internal comment to alert the specific user or set of users (as they wish) that a ticket matching their Request Type(s) has been submitted. This is a pain and sort of indicates to me that this is not what Atlassian intends you to do, because the Automation Default Event User has to be set to a real user with a JSD license, as mentioned here. 
• Alternatively, I think I could set up user groups for each queue, and then create notifications for the group as outlined here, but this doesn't give me the flexibility of notifying a single point of contact for the teams that want that option, unless I create groups of 1, which could get out of hand quickly.
• I also considered creating a workflow post function that notifies the component lead upon the ticket create step, and using components for each team member that wants to be notified. We're already using component though, and it's available on some of the Request create screens, so this would require some changes. 

What's the most efficient way to solve this problem? Would you stick with automations and spend the license on a robot user? Is it better practice to accomplish this with groups and notifications? Very interested to hear what others have done. Thanks!