Announcing: group approvals in Jira Service Management

[#1]

Hello Community,

We’re excited to announce that Jira Service Management Cloud now supports the ability to request approval from groups – not just individual users! Learn how to set up an approval.

When setting up an approval stage in the workflow editor, you can now choose to use a group picker (multiple groups) field to get approvers – the existing user picker (multiple user) and user picker (single user) fields are also still available.

We’ve grouped the fields by type, so you can find the right one quickly.

If you’re an admin and use a group picker field for approvals, you can also use a new approval condition: X approval(s) from each group. This allows you to specify how many members of each group in your group picker field must approve the request.

Best,
Jason

[David Sunter]

Excellent news, when will this be available in Jira Service Management on Data Centre? 

[Jason D_Cruz]

Thanks @David Sunter , The current release is for Cloud only. Let me check with the Data Centre team and get back to you.

[Jason D_Cruz]

@David Sunter ,I checked with the team and unfortunately, there are no current plans for this functionality on Data Centre.

[David Washburn]

@Jason D_Cruz is this feature for next gen / team managed projects? I frequently get excited about marketing emails from Atlassian only to find out the features don't apply to team managed projects. If this is another example of that then Atlassian should really invest in some way of knowing that before I spend the time to click on the marketing emails.

That said, I hope this is for team managed projects.

[Andrey Kiyanovskiy]

Having the possibility to use Project Roles would be great!

[David Gallant]

How can we tie this into an org chart, to let one of many director level employees approve tickets?

[Nathan Cunningham]

@David Washburn I totally agree. Atlassian should be including what the new features are available for in their marketing emails. I don't have the time in my cycles to spend trying to implement a new feature that actually isn't available to me. They also need to update company managed projects to be as easy to use as team managed projects.

[Cody Stevens]

This is great, I am happy to see this available now! 

[Laurence Hayes]

Sounds good - does the feature record who the approvers were

[Peter Ogden]

So, is this only for Company-managed projects? I don't see any new capabilities in Team-managed projects that might indicate that I can use groups in Team-managed workflows.

[priyanka]

Can we have sequential approvals from groups, Lets say I have added group a, b and c and I want Approval first from Group a ,then it should send approval request to  b and then c

[Jason D_Cruz]

@Pri : Sequential approvals can be achieved by using multiple approval workflow statuses and setting Group A in the first, Group B in the second and so on.

[Jason D_Cruz]

@David Washburn , @Peter Ogden , @Nathan Cunningham : The feature is only available for company-managed projects right now. We do intend to support all projects but are prioritising features for our ITSM template which is company-managed. 

We'll seek to ensure that the messaging is more explicit in our communications going forward.

[Jason D_Cruz]

@Laurence Hayes , the users who approved will be recorded after the approval is complete for audit purposes. We currently don't record which group they were a part of in the case of multiple Groups but expect to see that being resolved in future releases.

[Jason D_Cruz]

@David Gallant , that's a question a few of our customers ask. We have seen examples of customers importing their org directory into Insight and creating objects with relationships. You can then use a combination of approvals, Insight and automation rules to find the right "set of directors" to add to the approvers field.

Depending on your use case you may not need a Group field and can do it with the multi-user picker field itself. Do let me know if you'd like to discuss further.

[Jason D_Cruz]

@Andrey Kiyanovskiy : That's an area we've considered but is not on our short-term roadmap. I'd love to dive deeper into your use case if you'd like to.

[David Gallant]

@Jason D_Cruz If we could do that with Insight, I would be a new customer. We use almost all of your other products and this is something we struggle with. We need ticket approvals to move up one level, like our expense reporting does.

dgallant &at& devoted &dot& com

[Andrey Kiyanovskiy]

@Jason D_Cruz The use case for using project roles is simple. We want the groups to be manageable by project admins.

[David Washburn]

@Jason D_Cruz bummer, thanks for responding though. I'm glad Atlassian changed the name from Next-Gen to something else because Next-Gen implied that it was a new iteration of the existing product. Many of us jumped over to Next-Gen thinking all of the classic features would be back-ported into a more user-friendly tool only to find out many of those features have not, or may never, arrive.

At least the name change to Team Managed sets better expectations that it's actually a different tool entirely and not necessarily a "newer" product with enhanced features. Appreciate the update.

[Esther Strom [ACP-JA]]

@Jason D_Cruz is this feature only available in certain templates, or is it not fully rolled out to all instances? We are not seeing the Approver Groups option in the Get Approvers from Field dropdown in either of our instances.

[Esther Strom [ACP-JA]]

Also, the need to extend this to project roles wouldn't be necessary if the ability to set user filtering on multiple user pickers were implemented. We could then just set a new context in the chosen approvers field to filter by project role for the projects where this is necessary.

[Jason D_Cruz]

Hi @Esther Strom [ACP-JA] . The feature is available in all templates for company-managed projects.

Currently, the Approver Groups field is only created when a new project of type ITSM template is created. We are looking to fix this shortly.

Note that you can use any multi-group user picker field and it will work. Approver Groups is meant to be an OOTB field but you can create your own.

[Alex Janes]

This is awesome! Are there any plans to make this feature available for datacenter?

[Esther Strom [ACP-JA]]

@Jason D_Cruz thanks for the clarification.

[Jamie Schwartz]

This is great but unfortunately when someone in those groups approves, the history shows that X of Y members have approved and does NOT show the person's names that did the approval(s). Ideally this should track the person names that are doing the approvals for auditing purposes.