Approval functionality was the talk of Atlassian's High Velocity ITSM Q&A in London

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Thank you to everyone who attended Atlassian's High Velocity ITSM event in London! We were thrilled to see so many customers interested in Jira Service Management, and we hope you found the event valuable. For those unable to attend, you can access the event sessions on-demand here: https://events.atlassian.com/highvelocityitsm/on-demand.

We received a lot of questions specifically about approvals during the event, so we want to take this opportunity to consolidate our resources and share some helpful information about approvals in Jira Service Management.

Before we get into resources, what is an approval? 

In Jira Service Management, approvals can be used to manage and track the process of approving things like changes or requests within your organization. Approvals can be used to ensure that changes or requests are reviewed and approved by the appropriate individuals or teams before implementation and to provide a clear record of the approval process. An approval step can be easily added to any Jira Service Management workflow, ensuring requests are reviewed before they move to the next status in their workflow.

Examples of approvals include:

• Requests for new system accounts may need to be approved by an IT manager.

• Equipment purchases over a specific value might need to be approved by a group of people, including someone from Information Security, IT, and a Finance manager.

• Leave requests may need to be approved by an employee's direct manager.

• When deployments are made to a critical service, automated change requests are created with an approval step, gating the deployment until it is approved in Jira Service Management.

Approvals in Jira Service Management Cloud 

Getting Started - Cloud 

New to approvals in Jira Service Management Cloud? Start with our consolidated support documentation. There you will find instructions for various topics, including setting up approvals, adding custom or conditional fields, defining approvers, allowing customers to choose approvers, and approval by email, among others.

Group and email approvals 

Two popular approval use cases frequently asked about are group approvals and approvals by email, both of which are possible with Jira Service Management Cloud. Check out our YouTube video for more information on these use cases: Group and Email Approvals in Jira Service Management.

In addition to approval groups, Jira Service Management supports approvals from Change Advisory Board (CAB) members as well.

Note: Approvers don't need a Jira Service Management license to approve requests via email or the help center portal – they need to be customers of the service project.

Populate approvals field from Assets object schema (formerly Insight)

Expanding on the group approvals topic, you can use automation to populate the 'Approver groups' field with values from an Assets object schema. Check out this community post with an example of adding "Service cost center" group approvers to grant a customer's request to access software. Note that this process isn't just limited to group approvals: the user picker options for approvals can also be used here.

Automate approvals

Automation rules can also be used to auto-approve requests that meet certain conditions. For example, you might auto-approve purchase requests under a certain amount. Or your team may want to auto-approve standard changes. Learn how to set up rules to automate repetitive tasks.

Deployment gating (Premium and Enterprise plans only)

With deployment gating in Jira Service Management Cloud, teams can allow or prevent deployments at specific points in the change management process by connecting a CI/CD tool such as Bitbucket or Jenkins. When deployment gating is enabled, a change request with an approval step is created in Jira Service Management via automation. After the change request is approved, the deployment can be resumed.

New feature: Approvals Activity tab

Finally, the Atlassian team recently released a new feature for approvals for Jira Service Management Cloud: the Approvals Activity tab.

This tab provides clear information on the following:

• Who needs to approve (without breaking permissions and showing group membership)

• Who approved (and when)

• Who declined (and when)

We’ve also integrated those events into the All Activity tab, so you can easily see what else was happening on the request while the approval was open, as well as what happened to it after the approval was completed.

Approvals in Jira Service Management Data Center

Getting Started - Data Center 

Similar to our Cloud documentation, we have consolidated support resources for approvals in Jira Service Management Data Center. This resource includes steps for setting up an approval step, best practice customizations, auto-approving requests, and approval FAQs, among others.

Adding approvers from Assets (formerly Insight) to requests in Jira Service Management 

In Jira Service Management Data Center, you can also add owners of your assets or groups responsible for their maintenance as approvers, such as when a request is raised against the asset they own. The approvers will change dynamically based on the assets selected in your requests. Check out our support documentation here for more information.