Introducing request type and workflow templates in Jira Service Management!

[#1]

Hello Community  ,

We’re launching a few exciting new features that will save you loads of time and effort as you set up and customize your team’s company-managed project in Jira Service Management – request type and workflow templates! 

Instead of creating your own request types and workflows from scratch, you’ll have the option to browse a library of templates designed for all kinds of teams like IT, HR, or marketing. Select the one that best fits the way you like to work, and in a few short steps you’ll have your new request type or workflow that you can continue to customize later.

Available in all company-managed projects, these templates are a great starting point for Jira admins who are new to Jira Service Management, as well as those Jira admins who are looking to create consistency across multiple projects, or further customize their project to meet changing needs.

We plan to make request type templates available in team-managed projects some time in 2024, so stay tuned!

Why use templates?

A secret weapon for efficiency and consistency, templates provide a starting point to get you setup quickly, just like our project templates that come with pre-configured request types, workflows, and other default settings.

So we thought, why not offer templates to significantly reduce the number of steps and time it takes to create a new request type or workflow in a service project? Designed to showcase ideas and best practices relevant to a range of teams and use cases, the new templates can help with:

• Consistency: helping to ensure that all your request types and workflows are standardized and consistent across your service projects.

• Efficiency: saving you time and effort by using templates as a starting point, and reducing setup and configuration time.

• Best practices: benefiting from industry best practices while tailoring templates to your organization's unique processes.

• Streamlined onboarding: simplifying the onboarding process for new team members by providing them with predefined structures to work from.

• Scalability: scaling your service projects without the headache of recreating request types and workflows each time.

How do they work?

🆕 Request type templates – to quickly create a new request type

Adding a new request type to your company-managed project just got a whole lot easier.

From Project settings you’ll navigate to the Request types screen and select Create request type, then Create from template. 

You’ll be taken to a full-screen template library, showcasing a range of available request type templates that span use cases from Finance to HR. You can browse the template categories or search for the request type you need. Preview a template to see its description and request form fields.

Select the template you want to use to create your new request type.  

You’ll be prompted to review and make desired changes to the request type’s details including name, description, icon, portal group, and the issue type and its associated workflow. You can edit these details later in project settings.

When you’re ready to create your request type, select Save and the request type object will be created and associated with the selected issue type and workflow. Consistent with how things work today, no new issue types or workflows will be created.

Once you’ve created your new request type, you’ll land in the request type’s field configuration screen. Here you’re able to continue editing the request form and issue view fields for your request type.

Request type templates may contain fields that don’t already exist on your instance. Any new fields will be created as custom fields that you can edit in Jira settings. 

🆕 Workflow templates – to easily replace your request type's workflow

Every new request type, whether it’s custom built or created using a template comes with a default workflow based on its issue type. If you want to change a specific request type’s workflow in your company-managed project, there’s two ways you can easily replace it with a new one created from a template.

From Project settings, navigate to the Request types screen. Select the name of the request type you want to update and within that request type's configuration screen, select Manage workflow, then select Replace using template.

You can also replace a workflow using a template from the Request types screen by selecting the More actions menu next to the request type you want to update. Then in the Workflow section, select Replace using template.

In the workflow template library, you can browse the template categories or search for the workflow you need, with the option to choose workflows that come with preconfigured approvals steps. Preview a template to see its description, statuses, and transitions.

Select the template you want to use to create your new workflow. Your new workflow comes with a new issue type, so you’ll be prompted to review and make desired changes to the names of your new workflow and issue type. Select Continue and the new workflow and issue type will be added to your project and linked to the request type you chose to update. You can edit the details for both the request type and issue type later in project settings.

🆕 Request type templates in Blank project template – to help you get started in a new service project

We have started exploring how we might empower teams to get started quickly and easily by making the time-saving benefits of these templates available when a project is first created.

When creating a new company-managed project using one of our Blank service management project templates, you’ll have the option to use request type templates to add request types to your project before it’s created.

From the top menu bar select Projects, then Create project. From the Service management category, select a Blank project template, complete your project’s details, then select Create project. When you select Let’s go on the welcome screen you’ll land in the request type template library where you can browse, Preview, and Select a template to create a new request type.

Review and update the request type’s details including name, description, icon, portal group, and issue type and associated workflow. To add more request types, select Save and create another to be taken back to the template library. Repeat this process as many times as you like until you’ve added all your request types. When you’re done (or If you’re only adding one request type), select Save and continue to project.

Share your feedback

We are continuously striving to improve your experience with Jira Service Management, and these features are a direct result of your valuable feedback. We hope that request type and workflow templates will make your service management tasks more efficient and effective.

Please take this opportunity to explore and experiment with the templates, and share your thoughts with us. Your feedback is what drives our continuous improvement, and we can't wait to hear how this feature enhances your experience!

The Jira Service Management team

[Jack Brickey]

Thanks for the news @Gemma . This looks nice and I am anxious to give it a go. Is there documentation (similar to that for project templates) associated with this as yet that we can reference?

[Carmen Nadeau]

Thank you for the information @Gemma .

I did no see if it was possible for us to create our own templates, I hope it is !

[Prabhu Palanisamy _Onward_]

HI @Gemma - We love these features, particularly the request type and workflow templates focused on HR. Here is a quick demo on how we used these new features in our applications.

Hope you like it.

[Gemma]

Hi @Jack Brickeyhappy to hear you're eager to try out the new templates. As there are quite a few templates and we plan to keep refining them over time, we don't have all of them (and the many elements they contain) listed in any documentation. I'd suggest browsing the template categories and previewing the templates to get a feel for which ones you might be interested in. Here's the documentation we have so far for these new features:

• The benefits of using request type templates
• Create a request type
• Use workflow templates to replace a request type's workflow

If there's specific documentation you were after, or questions I can help answer here, please let me know. We're also keen to get your feedback on the templates so let me know your thoughts when you've had a chance to try them out!

Thanks,

Gemma

[Gemma]

Thanks @Prabhu Palanisamy _Onward_ for sharing, great to see the request type and workflow templates are useful with your application for HR teams!

[Gemma]

Hi @Carmen Nadeau thanks for your feedback, at the moment we don't have capability to create your own request type or workflow templates.

But I'm interested to learn more about how this would be useful for you and your team -

- what value would it provide?

- how would you use templates you've created?

- are there specific templates for teams you'd be looking to create?

Thanks,

Gemma

[Robert Hean]

Personally I'm not currently in a spot where I manage company-managed projects, but I appreciate how this will help narrow the knowledge gap required to manage Jira. Personally I find that tools exist to make our lives easier, and any improvement that makes those tools easier for more people to use is generally a good one.

[Haddon Fisher]

As an Admin, I would like to be able to manage (add\remove) the templates available for use because...

- Putting aside how good I think y'all are at guessing what users need (no offense meant, but in my experience the answer is "not very"), even the best guess will inherently still be a guess. I, on the other hand, know what we need.

- Beyond the worldwide generally accepted best practices, each organization will have its own requirements and standards. Even if every single one of the templates you create adheres to the former, there is no way you'd be able to nail the latter. Being able to control the templates displayed (and add our own) means we can enforce this internally; it's a lot harder to ignore a template that does all the work for you, versus a document.

- Just generally, when you're building a template system, you should always assume we're going to need CRUD.

[Gemma]

Thanks @Robert Hean for your interest in the templates! I'm interested in your current experience, are you happy to share what your role is and how/how often you use Jira Service Management?

We are currently working on bringing request type templates to team-managed projects some time next year. Would this be of benefit to you?

Thanks,

Gemma

[Gemma]

Thanks @Haddon Fisher  I appreciate you sharing your thoughts about templates functionality. We are aware that the templates won't always match exactly the specific needs of different teams.

They are designed to save time by being a starting point that can be further customized, and are a way to provide less experienced users with ideas for request types and workflows that might work for them.

The customers who joined our request type templates EAP helped to shape this first iteration of the templates feature, and through this process we heard feedback similar to yours. As a next step, we will explore how we might make it possible for people to add their own templates. I've noted your feedback about being able to remove templates as well, something for us to think about. We will keep the community updated with our progress.

Thanks again,

Gemma

[Haddon Fisher]

Thinking about these templates as a starting point makes some sense Gemma, particularly now that they come with things like resolution-setting and unsetting (this was the main reason I needed to immediately edit template-based projects in the past).

I do still wonder how useful they would be for that use-case at the end of the day though. For example, of all of the JSW templates I'm presented with (Kanban, Scrum, Top-Level Planning, and Bug Tracking) three of them are 99.999999% the same. I also would have a hypothesis that if you surveyed 100 Agile Coaches\Scrum Leads, you'd hear "this is too basic" 103 times.

Being able to control what's displayed there seems like the best way to make everyone equally unhappy!

</unsolicited opinion>

[Gemma]

Thanks @Haddon Fisher , please clarify if I have understood incorrectly here - do you mean to suggest having the ability to edit the fields in the template before you add the request type to your project would be valuable?

If so, how would this change your use of templates? 

Thanks,

Gemma

[Haddon Fisher]

Hi Gemma, now it's me whose lost 🤣 

I was saying that, in the past, the templates did not include some things that I considered "table-stakes"; off the top of my head, the big one was setting (and clearing) 'resolution' using post-functions. I recognize that there are times when a resolution code might need to be set manually, but in my experience these are few and far between.

I could see some value in being able to edit the templates, but mainly to update my own; I am not sure there's a ton of need to edit the "canned" ones.

[Gemma]

Sorry for any confusion @Haddon Fisher - thanks for sharing this feedback!

[Elmer A]

@Gemma To answer your question to @Carmen Nadeau :

- what value would it provide?
I'm setting up a new project. I have 3 Request Types (for Incident, Support, Change respectively) that I want to repeat for all the products that we sell. That's about 30 products. So I would have to create 90 Request Types manually. Being able to do this only 3 times and then saves those as templates so I can re-use them with one click and then only change the name of the product would save me tons and tons of time.

- how would you use templates you've created?
See above.

- are there specific templates for teams you'd be looking to create?
Specific product/issuetype templates.

[Gemma]

Hi @Elmer A  Sorry for my delay getting back to you here. Thanks so much for sharing your feedback on request type templates

It would be great to connect and have a call if you're open to it, I'd love to hear more about other templates you're after.

My email is galdrich@atlassian.com if you want to connect there and we can find a suitable time.

Thanks again, 

Gemma 

[Elmer A]

All good, @Gemma I discovered there is Clone option, which basically does what I needed, so the need for this template functionality has decreased from my side.

[Bhaargavi Natarajan]

@Gemma we have a new feature request related to the request type templates feature:

• Allow project admins the ability to create request types from templates

[Melanie Pasztor]

This feature is pointless if templates create a new issue type and add it to the project along with the workflow. When this was first announced, I was hoping to be able to keep the same issue types, yet each associated request type have a different workflow. "Replacing with existing" requires too many workarounds with inconsistent conditions on availability as alternative.

[Gemma]

Hi @Melanie Pasztor thanks for sharing feedback.

If you're creating a new request type from template on your project, we allow you to map to an existing issue type on the project, we aren't creating a new issue type at the moment.

Currently with workflow templates, select a request type and replace with a template option will create a new issue type. It's good to know your thoughts here on this experience.

Thanks,

Gemma

[Ramiro Justet]

Hi,

when we already have a structure in production what would be very helpful would be to be able to convert our request types currently in use in templates, so that when we need to create a new project we can reuse the request type that we already have configured.
Please let me know if this is currently possible or if there is any initiative in this regard.

Thank you very much!