Completing and Updating the change form without agent license

[Christian Anderson]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Managing changes with your IT service desk

I am still fairly new to JIRA. Once we upgrade to the latest JIRA version I am looking to have the change management service desk add-on implemented. I have noticed as a non-agent that when there are service desk tickets, as a non-agent you are limited really to just adding comments to these tickets. My question is that once the change management add-on is implemented I will have an agent license as the change manager but our technical teams will not. If we add fields like the start and completion date and the change risk do the technicians that are working on the change and in many cases creating the change able to add and update this information without having an agent license? 

[Marc-Allen Johnson]

After my original reply, we jumped in and started implementing JSD.  For now we've only focused on doing it for the Software and Solutions Division (I work in a University environment) to see how well it can work.

We are in the process of designing our ITIL change management process using a Service Desk project.

Because only agents can interact with the RFC issue in the traditional Jira way, we are relying heavily on the fact that "Customers" can "approve" actions on the workflow.  (This is a new functionality that JSD adds).  In fact, any "normal" Jira user can be assigned as the "approver".

Thinking of the ITIL Change process, this could work, with various roles like "CAB members", or "Peer reviewers" that can be assigned as approvers at various stages in the process.

What is severely lacking to make this work is a robust out-of-the-box automation component.  The one that is in the existing version is very limited - especially when trying to update fields on an existing issue (crazy!!).  Depending on your use case, you might be left with manual actions (e.g. setting approver depending on ITIL service being changed).

We are now seriously evaluating the following plugins to augment the JSD (and Jira) functionality:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.codebarrel.addons.automation/cloud/overview

and

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.onresolve.jira.groovy.groovyrunner/cloud/overview

Also, as expected, the email handling functionality of JSD and Jira is still rudimentary - you cannot go wrong with adding the "Email this issue" add-on (or something similar), if you work in an email-orientated environment!

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.metainf.jira.plugin.emailissue/cloud/overview 

[Marc-Allen Johnson]

Great question Christian, I am also evaluating Service Desk, especially the ITIL components, but after reading a lot of Atlassian articles, I am still unsure when agent licenses are required, and when non-agents can contribute (or how).  A document outlining these restrictions would be useful!

[Luke Galardi]

I agree.  It is confusing.  Here is one good link I found

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-questions/Change-Management-License/qaq-p/604336

[Marc-Allen Johnson]

Thanks Luke, that is useful - I also found this link useful:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/get-started-with-jira-service-desk/user-types-and-roles-917968277.html