1. Introduction

In today's digital age, more and more businesses are relying on tools to automate their processes, monitor their progress, and manage requests from colleagues and customers. More and more organisations are turning to Atlassian’s Jira Service Management to run their operations, for everything from requesting IT equipment to dispatching a heating engineer to a repair site.

While Jira Service Management is a powerful tool, running more complex workflows through it can be challenging, with organisations hitting difficulties around decision branching, escalation, and SLA reporting in a way that is meaningful and impactful within the tools. This is where ScriptRunner comes into the picture.

2. What is Jira Service Management?

Jira Service Management is a software tool that helps businesses manage customer requests. With its customisable workflows, Jira Service Management can help teams manage incidents, problems, assets, and changes. Teams can use Jira Service Management to achieve efficiency and consistency around repetitive tasks and ensure that requests are resolved quickly and in line with processes. Jira Service Management provides a range of features, including workflow automation, service-level agreement management, reporting, and collaboration.

3. Challenges with automating Jira Service Management workflows

Although Jira Service Management provides a range of features, setting it up to truly reflect the processes of your organisation can be tricky, leaving gaps along the way where you’re forced to rely on every employee following your best practice to the letter.

One of the common challenges that businesses face, as mentioned previously, is managing decision branching, where an organization decides on a course of action based on the outcome of a specific event. For example, if a customer raises a request for a refund, the system needs to check if the customer is eligible for a refund based on the company's refund policy. If the customer is eligible for a refund, the system needs to generate a refund request. However, if the customer is not eligible for a refund, the system needs to generate a rejection request. These kinds of branches can also be used to determine who work will be assigned to based on their current capacity, or the nature or seriousness of the request that has been raised.

There are as many combinations of factors as companies that use Jira Service Management, so trying to make the tool work for your teams without a little automation and customisation can quickly lead to frustration or inefficiency.

4. ScriptRunner and Jira Service Management

ScriptRunner is an app for Jira Service Management which enables teams to automate and customise their Jira Service Management workflows to better match the way they truly want work to flow.

ScriptRunner provides a range of automation features, which can be triggered on demand, on schedule, or reactively in response to an event within Jira Service Management. It provides many features that can simplify complex workflows and make them more manageable, and the recent release of ScriptRunner HAPI allows users to define the logic of these automations more easily than ever before.

Here are three features that make Jira Service Management work harder for your teams:

• Post-functions are actions that execute automatically after a workflow transition occurs. With ScriptRunner, teams can create custom post-functions that automate tasks based on specific conditions. For example, teams can create a post-function that sends an email to the customer when a request has been resolved.
• Listeners are events that trigger an action. For example, if a customer requests a new feature, the system can create a new issue automatically and assign it to a developer.
• Script fields are fields that teams can add to their Jira Service Management requests to capture and calculate additional information. For example, if a customer requests a refund, the system can add a refund amount field to the request in the customer’s local currency.

Examples of how automation tools can simplify Jira Service Management

Let's take a look at some practical examples of how automation tools can make Jira Service Management experiences better for both your teams and your customers.

Request triage

One of the common challenges that businesses face is triaging requests effectively. Create custom automated triage workflows which can quickly identify and categorise high-priority requests. For example, teams can create a triage workflow that checks the urgency of the request and assigns it to the appropriate team member. To go the extra mile, you can also use this event to trigger an alert in case of high-priority requests and make sure that urgent items never sit for long.

Escalations

Escalations are critical when SLAs are in place, and being smart about how you automate them shows a commitment to service and the understanding that not all tickets are created equal. Different ticket types need to be escalated differently, different customers or departments may have different SLAs driven by the nature of their work.

With smart automation tools you can build this nuance into your escalation services: for example, let’s say you have a service level agreement (SLA) in place for your support team, specifying that all high-priority requests must be resolved within 4 hours. With ScriptRunner, you can create a custom script that monitors the age of high-priority requests, and automatically escalates them to a higher level of management if they haven’t been resolved within the SLA timeframe.

Decision branching

Decision branching can be challenging, especially if there are multiple conditions that need to be considered. For example, let’s say you have a request type in Jira Service Management for Onboarding, and you want to automate the process of assigning the task to the correct team. Depending on the department the new employee will be joining, the task might need to be assigned to HR, IT, or another team. But is the person being onboarded a contractor or a permanent employee? Creating complex workflows that take different paths based on certain conditions using automation tools lets Jira Service Management handle these considerations for you in a hands-off, set-it-and-forget-it manner.