using assignee as the field to indicate who needs to work on issue

[Francisco Frechina]

We are trying to adopt Jira into my company and we are having some difficulties in the implementation.

Our company is divided into several departments and our idea is to create different Jira projects for each department.

The customer service department will use Jira Service Desk projects, in programming they will use Jira Software projects and in administration they will use Jira Core (business projects).

Our idea is that each employee of the company contains (at least) 2 filters of issues:

     1) "assignee in (currentUser ()) AND status! = CLOSED ORDER BY priority DESC"

*** With this filter we get people to know what they have pending work to do.

We assume that the assignee is the person who has something to do in an issue.

     2) "reporter in (currentUser ()) AND status! = CLOSED ORDER BY priority DESC"

*** With this filter we get people to know the status of what they have asked for.

The reporter is responsible for verifying that the incident has been resolved

and if so, close it and then it will disappear from this list

With our approach we have found 2 problems that make us doubt if we are using Jira properly.

     Problem 1)

When users within the company report incidents to Service Desk projects, they cannot be assigned because they are not service desk agents.

     Problem 2)

When users within the company report incidents to Service Desk projects, they cannot close incidents unless they create them from the customer portal.

We know some possible solutions, but I would like to know the opinion of the community since maybe we are doing something wrong with Jira.

     Solution 1)

Create 2 projects in customer service to handle incidents from outside (Jira Service Desk) and inside Jira Core (business), so that employees could create incidents inside and can be assigned when required.

     Solution 2)

Do not change the assigned and put the employees "listening" to certain workflow states.

I hope you can help me with your comments.

Thank you

[Radu]

Hi,

It's a tough problem to have and keeping the license price down is a challenge. The easiest way would be to give anyone that would work on service desk issues a license, but that would be costly.

I think your solutions are pretty good but I dislike the idea of support managing 2 projects.

What if you would add another "assignee" field ... call it "responsible" which would be a general user field. You would then use that field to get the person responsible to do the work & you could update the JQL filters above accordingly. Then other thing you need to do is to create some customer transitions for the Core & Software users to use.

An example flow would be :

1. Issue is created with status "Open"

2. An agent picks it up and puts it into "In support" with the Agent as the assignee.

3. Agent realises it's up to someone else to do the work and transitions it into "In External Support" with the "responsible" field set to an External user. 

4. The External user does the work then uses a customer transition to put it back into "In support" or "close" depending on where you want it to go.

5. Issue is closed or handed back to the agent.

The caveat here is that you it's messy to manage. Have few External facing statuses so you avoid that.

Add some conditions / post-functions , if you want, to clear the Assignee field when putting in an external responsible user to mark it clearly to Support team.

I'm sure there are more tweaks that can be done but I'll leave that up to you.

Cheers,
Radu