How can I assign tickets to teams/groups/roles rather than individual IT support staff/agents?

[Ian Swinnerton]

We have just started using Jira Service Management as a basic heldpesk tool where customers can log tickets and a team of 8-10 IT staff investigate and resolve them. It is all set up within one single project, with tickets filtered into queues by 'Organisation' origin (we are supporting a number of sites based on geographical location, site customers are assigned an organisation at account creation based on that site location.)

In our previous tool, our IT staff were assigned to resolver groups (eg Desktop Support team, Apps support team, Network suppor team etc) and when a ticket arrived in  the tool, it could be assigned to the appropriate resolver group, all members of the group would be notified, and the team decided on who would be assigned to investigate/resolve it.

We want to do the same in Jira, but can't see a suitable option. We have our IT team members set up with multiple roles but the functionality to do what we require with this seems to be lacking in terms of group assignment/notifications/queue monitoring etc.

At present we are having to have certain IT staff co-ordinate the assignment of tickets to individual staff as they see fit, and this is not ideal.

Third party advice and reading through the community posts seems to point towards creation of custom fields and filters to achieve our goal, but where would we start with this. It seems such an obvious functional requirement for the tool that I can't believe no-one has created a solution?

Any tips would be much appreciated!

[Tuncay Senturk · Accepted solution]

Hello @Ian Swinnerton 

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I totally feel your concern, and this is a very good question. There is no out-of-the-box solution, you have to find an appropriate workaround according to your needs. On top of what @Dirk Ronsmans said, you might need to have a smart assignment post function. You could do that on your own with Automation or if you are free to check 3rd party solutions I'd suggest Smart Assignment Post Function of Enhancer. I'm one of the folks behind this app, I might be biased though!

[Ian Swinnerton]

Thanks for the information, much appreciated

[Dirk Ronsmans · Accepted solution]

Hey @Ian Swinnerton ,

Team assignment of support tickets is indeed a major lacking feature in JSM. At this time the only easy fix is to create a new custom field of type "User Group Picker (single)" and have the tickets be assigned on those groups.

You can then use your queues to filter them since your users will be a member of those groups

Annoying thing tho is that there is no link between assignee and the custom "team assignee" field, so you'll be able to assign a ticket to a user/agent that is not a member of the team but that comes down to common sense.

I do know that Atlassian is working on a new type of Team field where this might be possible out of the box but seems they are focusing first on Jira Software for this.

Sadly a workaround like I suggested is your easiest and quickest solution.

[Ian Swinnerton]

Many thanks, this custom field creation is what has been suggested to me - silly question, but where do I find the option to create a custom field so I can have a play around with it and test?