Can Participants Work Log Time on Issues?

[JF Simard]

We have JIRA Core ans Service Desk.

We use Request participants to have developers work on an Service Desk Issue, how can they track/log time?

I am not able to assign them permissions in Issues Time Tracking, please advise.

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_ · Accepted solution]

Hi JF,

Short answer: No.  One must be an agent to log time on a service desk project.  Options are give them an agent license.  OR spawn off a linked issue into their project where they can log their time.

Hope that helps

Susan

[JF Simard]

Thank you Susan,

1. We can't give Agent licenses to all developers - too costly
2. Log time in a Linked Jira Ticket will defeat the purpose of having centralized issues.

No other work around you can think of?

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

Hi,

Unless you get into some tricky scripting to add in the logged work time from a linked issue.  I have fiddled there before, it's not great.

:-(

[JF Simard]

Bummer,  can't come to throwing the towel. I've worked hard to try to make the integration to Service Desk work with our workflow, but it is difficult.

[Jack Hunter [HeroCoders]]

@JF Simard, could you explain what your workflow is? I'm curious if this is something that that can be solved with an add-on.

Thanks,
Jack

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You're definitely going to need some code and a workaround to "fix" this - Susan's answer is completely right, so you'd need something that logs time for the users somewhere else.  Off the top of my head, you could

• Put faked logs on the main issue (problem is how you capture the worklog and record a different user for it)
• Put participant work logs on a linked issue (recording in two places, not great)
• Put all work logs on a linked issue and don't record Agent time on the actual JSD project (still a pain on reporting, but I'd want to automate "agent logs work, so we move it to the linked issue" to reduce it a bit)

[JF Simard]

@Jack Hunter [HeroCoders]Sure, first I just checked for a self-managed server for 10 users would be $4,100 which is way too expensive.

We currently use Kayako On Demand for Service Desk but most client support requests come through email. We use JIRA for everything else. Since all our client work is on JIRA we wanted to centralize Service Desk Email Support with JIRA and having tickets created automatically, which we could assign to developers, NOT necessarily Support Desk Agent.

We thought we could use Participants as we have been told or read, but NOT being able to log time wold need me to create a duplicate ticket in JIRA Software since we keep all tickets assigned to clients accounts. 

[JF Simard]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- Thank you for your suggestions, I already thought of 2 and 3 - not great.

Faked logs is interesting,...food for thought...heh, not really.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Yeah, I know, this one is a pain.  It would be really a lot easier if "participants" could just log time directly on calls. 

My work is such that I do get randomly pulled into JSD calls and I have to record time against them.  I get away with it because we have effectively unlimited agents so I can have a licence, and there's zero benefit for me in doing anything "wrong" in the project (plus I know it well enough not to).  I answer the questions and log the work.  But most sites don't have that power.

[JF Simard]

@Nic Brough -Adaptavist- Having enough licenses would solve everything but too expensive. Thank you for all your input, much appreciated.

[Tom Jones [Appsvio]]

Hi @JF Simard 

You can use this app to enable log work feature by non-agent users. 

Cheers, 

[Emre Bodur]

Ok, but Atlassian would loose potential income by allowing this? In my case, I'm looking only for this kind of feature to have only one SM project. Currently it's too risky for me in the cloud instance to go this way, because Atlassian could change it any time -> this would bring me in a stressful situation.