Approvals Workflow for Service Desk

[Tom Bamford]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Best practices for IT teams using JIRA Service Desk

Our service catalog has a separate owner for each component. Using Service Desk Cloud, how do I create a workflow that requests multiple approvals based on which components are selected, then transitions to an 'approved' state once all of the approvals have completed?

NB we don't want the Service Desk team to have to triage approvals every time a new service ticket is raised.

[vwong]

Hey @Tom Bamford, we recently just launched an approvals feature on JIRA Service Desk and it is available on cloud already! Feel free to check out the docs: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/SERVICEDESKCLOUD/Setting+up+approvals

Cheers,
Vincent

[Chris Whitten [Comskil]]

@Vincent Wong when is it going to be available on JSD for server? Thanks

[Van de Velde Admin]

Same question here!

[Joe Mullin]

Wow, that approval function looks great!  We just upgraded our server install from JIRA 6 to JIRA 7 with Service Desk and it completely screwed up how we did approvals.  This would fix our problems!  Please give us an estimate for when this will be available for server installs.  Thanks!

[vwong]

Hi all! Sorry for the late reply but this feature will be available in our next JSD server release. I do not know the exact date of the release but looking at the cadence we had in the past of 3-4 months every major release, I will say the next release will be available very very soon  

[Phill Fox]

Firstly the fact you are hosting in Cloud restricts your options on how you can add plugins to extend workflow actions.

If you were hosting behind the firewall one approach (and there are plenty of other approaches).  This is just a framework and you could of course adjust and adapt as appropriate.

As you want each approval to be tracked these could be raised as subtasks of an Approval issue type.
 Your workflow for each Approval subtask can then be "To do" -"More information required" -  "Done"  Your Done state should be restricted to two Resolutions  - Approved/Rejected.

Then on your main task I would have a workflow transition called "Request Approval" this would have a post function that looks at which components are selected and create an Approval subtask for each.  (This will require a scripting plugin such as ScriptRunner)

Now that your main issue is in the Approvals requested state you can put a condition on the next workflow out to check the resolution of all subtasks of type Approval. Here is where you can get very imaginative with how you approach this. The simplest is all must be Status=Done and Resolution=Approved.  But you might feel it is appropriate to have something which scores as a majority approved. (Your business process should define). I would also allow a Project Lead to overrule the approvals for when appropriate.

If you have ScriptRunner you can also set listeners to see when all approvals are complete and auto-transition.

I realise that this is not the most appropriate answer to your question but it should show you that exactly what you would like is possible (albeit requiring a different hosting). The issue is now one of whether the benefits of hosting in Cloud are of greater business impact than the restrictions.  

For the benefit of those reading this post in the future... Please be aware that the Plugin developers are actively working on their plugins to make Cloud-compatible versions so this is likely to become possible in the future and my statement about Behind the Firewall will then be outdated.

I would welcome anyone who has an alternative solution on a Cloud hosted instance to detail how they would approach this user story.

Phill