Using service desk to manage release requests

[Esther Strom]

We have a full Atlassian Cloud ecosystem - Jira Software, Jira Service Desk, Confluence, and Bitbucket.

We're looking at using an internal service desk project to manage releases, as there's a built-in ITIL workflow with approvals that does exactly what we need it to do (i.e. configure a threshold of approvals before a request is considered "approved", etc.)

We are not CICD yet; we still do scheduled releases. Our releases always include tickets from multiple Jira projects, as we have a project per team. (We do use the release hub in each project to eventually close out a release, but that doesn't account for the cross-project approvals required.)

I've set up a field on the release request that allows the requester to enter a fixVersion, and added an Automation for Jira rule that adds links to all issues in all projects that have that fix version at the time the request issue is created.

Not all of our users have service desk agent licenses, and due to the restrictions on the portal view (i.e. not displaying linked issues), many of the approvers who would be involved in the process would not actually be able to see the list of issues to be included in the release. I've considered having the requester create a Confluence page (Jira Report -> Change Log) and pasting a link to it into the description of the service desk ticket; this would allow all of our users to view the contents of the release. But it also adds extra steps for the requester, and requires approvers to open a separate page to view the contents.

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So tell me, all-knowing admins, how do your companies manage this process?