Advice on best way to use sub-tasks for an onboarding workflow

[Ed Hirst]

We're trying to automate our onboarding tasks using JSD.

Most tasks are dealt with by internal service desk agents. There are a handful of tasks that need to be performed by external (i.e. non IT) personnel; i.e. creating a physical building access badge, provisioning access to a system not controlled by IT.

These events need to be audited for request / response to / from the relevant person inside the business.

In our old Zendesk, we would simply copy everybody on the ticket and wait for them to respond. I was hoping to make this more streamlined in JSD but am struggling.

We have the sub-tasks being created, but obviously cannot assign without making people an Agent. Using up a license for somebody that needs to respond to a ticket once every few months seems like a waste.

I have considered adding them as a Watcher, or a Participant, but need the sub-task to send out a pre-formatted email request that the person can respond to and have that response logged against the sub-task.

I feel like the only way to do that is to add them as Assignee, which brings us back around to licensing up (and giving more access than necessary) to non-IT personnel.

Am I missing a workflow idea, or is this the only way? How are other people dealing with these scenarios ?

[Ed Hirst]

Still struggling with this. I've tried creating sub-tasks and assigning our non-IT people as Participants to each task, in the hope that we could trigger Jira to send a mail with the description, or some other content.

That also seems not to work, as I can add a participant, but they don't get any mail from the sub-task, regardless of if we change the description, add an internal or customer-facing comment.

[Brandon Kofer]

@Ed Hirst did you ever find a good way of doing this in JSM? It's been years and I am still stuck with this issue lol.

[Ed Hirst]

@Brandon Kofer My bad, I didn't see your reply last year!

We have this working but it's a bit of an all-or-nothing approach after lots of testing with automation workflows.

I have an automation that creates the subtasks. Assignee is 'Copy from trigger issue' so that an IT person always owns it, then we populate the description field with the message we want the non-IT person to see, and set the Reporter to that non-IT person who will be doing the task.

The Summary for all of the tasks starts with 'Onboarding Request:' which is important for later.

At the end of the automation, I transition the issue to a status which then triggers a follow-up workflow.

The follow-up workflow triggers based on that prior status. For all linked tasks, if 'Summary contains "Onboarding Request:", I add a comment to the issue:

{{issue.fields.description}}

This copies the description below, adds it as a comment, and then the reporter that actually has to do the task receives an email. Finally we transition the tasks to Pending.

To handle the closing of these tasks, I make them all a custom issue type of "Employee Linked Task" and have an automation that runs as follows:

- WHEN rule is triggered on "Comment is the main action"

- Issue type = Employee linked task

- Initiator is "Issue reporter"

- status equals Pending

- THEN transition the issue to CLOSED.

So we lose the ability for the person doing the task to communicate back & forth in Jira, but I add the reference to the IT person handling the ticket in the description, so hopefully if there are any questions they can liaise with one another directly via Slack.

Hope this makes sense!

Description Field:

(Some of the field references still use the old customfield format because I got lazy and didn't go and change them all)

Hi <name>,
We have a new hire at <company> effective {{customfield_10297.format("MM/dd/yyyy")}}.

Please <do whatever they're supposed to do> and Reply to this message once setup is complete.
The task will close automatically on response. If you have a query about this task, please reach out to {{assignee.displayName}} directly.


*New User Details*
*Name:* {{customfield_10293}} {{customfield_10292}}
*Title:* {{IT: Job Title}}
*Department:* {{IT: Department}}
*Email address:* {{IT: Email}}

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

If they are using their own Project in Jira, you can use Automation rules to create an issue in their Project and link to the JSD issue. You can have the automation trigger based on a condition such as a filed set a particular way, etc.

[Ed Hirst]

They’re not, we just want to alert them that there’s a specific thing they need to do, and have them respond once it’s done and have that response be logged against the ticket. 

[Brandon Kofer]

I know this is an older post but this is exactly what I am trying to do. Any luck on how to notify external teams of a subtask that they have to action and at least allow the ability to have them comment on whether they took the required action?