JSM Newbies: let’s talk automation! ⚡️

[#1]

Would you rather have a kitchen appliance that can cook you a four-course meal at the push of a button? Or a teleportation device? An eight-armed robot that gives you the perfect blowout every time? Or a walk-in closet that also dresses you each morning?   

While I’m here patiently waiting for every Jetsons prediction to come true, I’ll be honest: Jira Service Management can’t do any of the above for you. (Yet?) But it does have its fair share of automations that can make life a little easier.

For those of you who are new to Jira Service Management, I’d love to know: are you using automations yet? And, if so, which ones have saved you the most time/manual effort so far?

Actually, scratch that.

Let’s make this a little more fun. Here’s what I’d love to read from you in the comments (please use the corresponding emojis so our community here can quickly scan for responses):

⚙️ Automations you’re currently using in JSM and why you like them (or don’t)
✋ Manual tasks you’d love to be able to automate in JSM (but aren't sure how)
🤖 Automations you wish existed (in the “real world”)

Here, I’ll go first:

⚙️ I’d be lost without my automation to close out tickets when I’m done working on them. I get so distracted moving on to the next thing that I often forget to tie up loose ends. (Sorry, boss!)

✋ I'd love for AI to auto-create and send responses at certain stages to better scale common customer interactions, so I can focus my energy on bigger challenges. Does this exist? Is anyone doing this already?

🤖 Custom bread delivery. I KNOW. Delivery food apps already kind of do this, but I’m talking any bread I want, any time, still hot out of the oven — and right to my front door.


Can’t wait to see what’s on everyone’s minds!

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Interested in automations but not sure where to start?
(This part of the post is for you!)

Literally anyone (with the right permissions) can write a rule to automate an action. I promise.

Rules are made up of three parts: triggers, conditions, and actions. This Overview guide introduces each part and shows how to connect them to make things happen. It also has a pretty great tutorial section for building some of our most popular automations, like auto-assigning issues, auto-closing old tickets, and reopening issues when a customer comments.

Give it a try or check out our template library for more inspiration. Bonus: it comes with an Automation Playground – a safe sandbox environment that lets you try out rules before making them live in your instance.

Then come on back and let us know what you think!

[trthomas]

⚙️I love the ability to automate the creation of a new ticket and copy the information from the existing ticket to the new ticket.  We use this all the time to create/copy information from one project to another project.

⚙️We've also automated a "report" that sends me an email each week on upcoming devices that are going to be EOL (end of life).  This one is tied to Assets where we track the EOL date. 

[Brielle Johnston]

Love this, @trthomas ! Any time I can save myself a copy/paste is a huge win!

[Stephen_Lugton]

Thanks for this @Brielle Johnston 

⚙️Like you I use automation to close off epics and sub-tasks when the associated stories / tasks are complete

⚙️We also have automation that adds approver groups to our CAB tickets depending on which project it relates to and sends out a MS Teams message to let those groups know that there is a CAB ticket that needs approval.

⚙️And one of our use cases for JSM is as an entry point for new business cases with a lot of background automation to calculate effort from which teams are selected to work on the business case, and for how long, then update that along with costs, etc into JPD to allow the business change board to prioritise what gets worked on

⚙️I also have a lot of other automation tasks set up with manual triggers so that admins can go in and perform clean up, etc. with a couple of mouse clicks

[Keith Jones]

Not a Newbie, but still learning! Some of my automation work includes:
⚙️Onboarding/Offboarding. Specific steps in the HR issue workflow will create standardized subtasks for HR, send out emails to non-agent team members. Once the required information has been completed, a matching IT issue is created using that information, and again, standardized subtasks are created for the IT team, leading to a standard, repeatable process for onboarding and offboarding

⚙️Development Work. Issues that come in to the service desk are converted over to JSW issues for the application development team. Specific points in the SDLC are mirrored back to the JSM issue for automated communication with the requestor.

⚙️Work Reminders. Automated email reminders for work in specific projects that has not been updated in the past 2 weeks.

⚙️Contract Termination Reminders. Automated email reminders when a contractors' termination date is 30 days out as a reminder to the manager to begin the renewal process if applicable.

⚙️Test Issues. Automatically categorize and resolve issues created as part of SDLC QA work.

✋I haven't researched this in detail yet, but I'd love to learn how to generate a view of automations that apply to specific workflows. For example, a list of workflows that shows a sub-list of each automation associated with that workflow. That way, if I make changes to a workflow, it's easier to see the impact to existing automation. 

✋Some automation is set to a specific user - perhaps there is some way to global change a user if they leave the company? Or at least report on every automation that uses that user name?

🤖Self-emptying garbage cans.

[Brielle Johnston]

@Stephen_Lugton Yes! The workflow automations are some of my favorites, too. A little bit of a spicy followup for you: have any tips for when the approvers don't, well, get around to approving? 

@Keith Jones 👏👏👏 Really great list! I can think of so many different applications/variations for the contract termination reminder. Going to bring this to my own team. Also, big yes to self-emptying garbage cans. Right now, my automation for that is my husband, but timelines for completion are wildly unpredictable.

[Stephen_Lugton]

@Brielle Johnston we have a CAB approvers channel in Teams, so when approval is delayed I put a comment out that the CTO sees to remind an approver that they need to click the green button, often it's actually the CTO that needs to do so, I find that I normally get an approval after the next meeting that person is in.

I've also created a sneaky manual automation that the only the Change Manager and his deputy can run to bypass approvals, it asks why you've bypassed the approval and adds a comment, but it also posts a message to the CAB approvers channel saying that 'Name' bypassed approvals, and when that happens it gets questioned very quickly; it's only happened when a normal change suddenly became an emergency change!

[Allan O_ Millar]

I love learning from all of you just by reading your posts. Thanks for sharing, and all the best to everyone. 👍👏🙌🎉