Share your Experience with Service Desk automation

[Andrew Bilukha]

If you have implemented or administered Jira Service Desk, I am interested in learning about your experience with Service Desk Automation module.  It is such a great idea, it has an enormous potential, yet the out-of-the-box features are somewhat limited in terms of flexibility of editing custom fields, moving issues to a different issue type, etc.
Have you faced these challenges? How have you resolved them?

A couple of interesting use cases:

- Triage based on key word - if we capture a specific word, like "broken" - to move a ticket to a different issue type and Customer Request Type. For example switch from Service Request to Incident issue type, and from "General IT Help" to "Desktop Support" Customer Request Type.

- Auto-closure of tickets that are stale - if a specific SLA is broken -- set resolution, set custom fields' value, log time, transition tickets to "Closed" state. The challenge here is the lack of availability of automation of custom fields, log work.

- A hurdle with Issue Type / Customer Request Type pairs:  it's not a secret that the implementation of Issue Type / Customer Request Type poses some challenges.  There is no good mechanism for a Service Desk agent to quickly flip tickets between Request/Incident/Problem issue types. Furthermore, if the the issue type is changed, one has to mop up the Customer Request Type.  How did you address this challenge?  For our service Agents that have to deal with dozens of tickets on a daily bases, this is a real productivity and usability downfall of the system. It takes upwards of 15 mouse clicks to change the IssueType and CustomerRequestType.

Welcome your comments, thoughts, suggestions.

Respectfully,

Andrew Bil

[Monique vdB]

@Jack Brickey do you have any experience with this or suggestions for @Andrew Bilukha to get some insight here? Thanks!

[Jack Brickey]

@Andrew Bilukha, I have setup a number of automations and really wish I had more time to refine and set up more TBH. I thought I would share my thoughts and what I have done.

First, I love the built in JSD Automation and it meets much of my needs however, when it does not I reach to the Automation for Jira addon as it add much more flexibility.

Looking at your example UCs here are my thoughts:

• Triage on key word - Here is a combination of what I have done and overlaying your specific details: When issue created > If issue matches Summary ~"printer" > Then do this Edit Request Type "Printer" + Edit Request Type Assignee = "Fred". You can't change the issue type but I think you could from the aforementioned addon.
• Auto-closure of stale tickets - I certainly have something like this setup in my JSD for "non-responsive customer" scenarios and it works great. However, as you pointed out automating work logging isn't available. That said, I really don't think I would want to do this via automation as I feel it needs human input. Rather I simply require time logging on transition to the resolved status. As for custom fields certainly the addon will work here I suspect.
• Issue Type/Request Type Challenges - I concur with your observations. However, I do recall some recent Community discussions and or Atlassian announcement of improvements here at least in Cloud but can't lay my fingers on it. Long story short this is a know issue and suspect Atlassian will be addressing. For me at the moment I just don't worry with this too much, especially the part where when I change the issue type the request type is messed up. Further, while it might be possible to use advanced automation functions of an automation addon I would be concerned about the stability and reliability of such an automation. In otherwords, I think this needs to be resolved by Atlassian. One final note you might consider - I wonder if this could be handled through workflow:issuetype relationship that would necessitate a Move operation between issuetypes and enforce updating the request type. Unsure if this would really work and certainly might not be desirable.

Thanks for your post as it hits on a couple things I have been interested in so maybe other's ideas will help us both.

Cheers!

[_Fabian A. Lopez]

@Jack Brickey Thanks for your comprehensive response. I really appreciate your time!

[_Fabian A. Lopez]

@Carl E_ Allen any insight that you could provide to the team? Andrew is one of our AUG Members. Thanks in advance