Workflow or Automation for assignees?

[Rob Voegele]

Really new here, been searching and checking online and I haven't found a solid answer yet.  We have a demo of Service Desk and I am trying to setup some 'simple' workflows/automation as tests. 

I created a custom field named 'Assigned Group'.  In an incident, if I change the assignee to 'John A' who is on the desktop team, I want to automate the 'Assigned Group' field to change to 'Desktop Team'.  (And eventually if you change the 'Assigned Group' team to another team, clear the 'Assignee' field.)

What is the cleanest way to do this in everyone's opinion?

Thanks!
Rob

[Jack Brickey]

Rob,

it really depends on some details that aren't clear in you question. Having said that let me try to move the discussion forward.

1. I would create groups for each of the teams so you have that to work w/ in various scenarios.
2. I would consider either creating unique issue types for each team OR create request types that align with the team OR use Components to align with teams. The idea here is that you want to be able to bucketize the requests
3. I would create a queue per team. The queue will be a JQL query that takes into account the method you chose in #2.
4. I would create a Triage queue for ALL new (unassigned) issues to hit. Then you would have some set of agents identified to triage the new issue and get them into the right team queue.

As an asside, one thing to consider is that you may want to have a blended solution of JIRA SW and JIRA SD. I only raise this as a consideration based upon the teams you mentioned. Typically, development teams work best in JSW. 

Hopefully this helps or at least gets us closer to your use case.

[Rob Voegele]

First off, thank you for your reply!  I am wading into the deeper water and it is murky for sure.  All help is appreciated!

#1 - Two votes for groups from 'Community Champions', seems I am getting a consensus, which is great. 

#2 - Would this allow 'unassigned cases' for a team that wasn't mine?  (More info in my post just above)  What do you mean when you say 'components' here?  And yes, trying to figure out the exact way to bucketize everything properly before we get too far from the start line. 

#4 - My team would triage all incoming.  But right now we have the ability to 'cold transfer' to one of the other team queues.  Is there similar functionality, or should we consider transitioning to a warm handoff?

We have JSW (recently implemented, coding sprints), but those teams are also somewhat dev-ops.  We are a small company and they are the escalation path for specific products they work on. 

[Steven F Behnke]

I wouldn't do this at all, because you'll need to maintain lists of users to a team. I would use groups instead.

Put John A in the group "desktop-team". When the issue is assigned to John A, you'll be able to query assignee in membersOf("desktop-team").

[Rob Voegele]

Steven,

Yes, we knew we would need to keep a list to map everyone to groups.

We are trying to do this because of another issue we couldn't figure out.

We have a desktop team, server team, network team, dev team, data team and web team.  What is the best way to work with multiple teams in the same 'project'?  We made the custom field so we could them make queues off of that.  Is there a better way? 

[Steven F Behnke]

I still think my Groups/memberOf() approach gets you the power and data you're looking for. Is there a reason that this doesn't work for you?

If you choose any other approach, you need to use listener/workflow automation to update your custom field, but you're not gaining any additional granularity.

[Rob Voegele]

Honestly, it is my unfamiliarity with the product.  I am truely not sure if this will 'work' or not for our use case. 

I did some research on this, I was able to setup a group and enter the JQL snippet I would need.  Tested, and that would work for one part.  (I am assuming I can tie it into an AD group and that would handle membership, which would be great.)

BUT, is there a way to handle unassigned cases to these teams?  Current ticket system allows my team to triage, determine it needs to be escalated and dump it in a queue for them unassigned.  Otherwise everything would need to be a warm handoff to an engineer. 

I apprecaite your responses!  Only had this installed for 5 days and they don't exactly walk you through best practices or suggested deployment scenarios. 

[Steven F Behnke]

1. Yes, you can sync groups from external directories like Active Directory
2. I see, group assigned issues without a specific assignee yet. I see why my proposal is a problem now.
   
   Honestly I would still keep this to groups. You could add a Group Picker field. This would allow the triage to select a Group for assignment. 
   
   The nice thing about this is that you could add this "Group Picker" field to the notification scheme: This would allow you to send the entire team a "Assigned" notification of sorts.