"How can non-technical teams use Jira automation?" Find out in this episode of Appfire Presents: The Best IT Service Management Show by Appfire.
Daniel Alonso of Trundl, Inc., explains how to use automation in Jira for non-technical teams like HR and legal can use Jira automation to streamline on-boarding, off-boarding, approvals, and more.
About the guest
Daniel Alonso is sr. Atlassian expert at Trundl Inc., an Enterprise Platinum Atlassian Solution Partner focused on empowering development and business teams with Atlassian Solutions.
About the show
The BEST ITSM Show by Appfire brings you expert insights for IT service delivery, so your employees and customers have what they need to succeed. Get the right tech and tips for the right job at hand. Look like you’ve come from the future with all your new ITSM smarts. Every episode is a brisk 10 minutes—less time than it takes to provision a laptop or troubleshoot a tech support issue.
For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode:
How can non-technical teams use Jira automation?
Kerry: Today we’re going to address the question how can non-technical teams use Jira automation. To help us answer that question is Daniel Alonso, senior Atlassian expert at Trundl Inc., an enterprise platinum Atlassian solution partner focused on empowering development and business teams with Atlassian solutions. Stick around to learn a little something about automation for non-technical teams.
Daniel, thanks so much for joining. When we’re talking about non-technical teams, what kinds of business teams are we talking about?
Daniel: Thanks for having me on the show. I’m talking about teams that manage people, like HR, or people that create contracts, like legal teams, and they are now getting to use Jira Service Management and they start taking a look at how to optimize their processes in Jira Service Management, taking advantage of that and using some add-ons to achieve this goal. I can give you an example of an HR onboarding process that we’re using.
Kerry: Sure. When we say non-technical teams like HR and legal, they’re definitely not going to want to sit in with you and take some lessons in Jira, so you’re talking about making things work easier for them in a way that they don’t have to participate in creating the automation.
Daniel: Yes. Once we edit the requirements and we say this piece of the requirements can be done by the technical team and the piece of the requirements can be done by the project manager or HR that would be like the project manager, then we can explain the functions and they can start working with forms.
With automation for Jira, it’s a tool that you can just drag and drop. You can easily use conditionals and then do actions once your condition is true or false. It’s very easy to use and very easy to manage for the product manager. Even if they are not technical, it’s a decision maker tree and they can easily do some actions such as create tickets and assign tickets.
One of the examples of HR teams is that when they select applications in the form, they want to create one ticket per application selected, they can easily create a conditional tree and for each application selected they can create a ticket and assign it to the correct team, put the description, copy information from the ticket, link it to another ticket, etcetera. So, for this team it’s easy to use and easy to maintain.
If they create a mess, because that does happen, they can just create a ticket with the technical team, the technical team can go and check the automation created by the project manager and give it a shine wash.
Kerry: I’m sure you’re like, “Nice job, guys.”
Daniel: Nice job, well done. It delegates a lot of work from the technical team and gives a perspective for the project manager of what can be done and what cannot be done in the automations and the Jira scope.
Kerry: How often do you need to update automations like that? I don’t know how often HR revisits their procedures, but I’m going to guess that it’s at least a couple times a year. So, are these easy to update?
Daniel: Yes, they’re easy to update. Normally, the only thing that you need to update are the conditions or if they need to add a new application into the list, so you need to go through the automation and update the conditionals, and that’s it. If they want to change something in the summary, they’re pretty easy updates. They don’t require very complex requirements.
Kerry: Can you do this with Jira out of the box, or with Jira automation out of the box, or do you need plugins for things like this?
Daniel: We can definitely do a basic solution with out of the box automation for Jira, but we can take advantage in a more technical perspective from inside pro format to get some information. If the requirement is very complex, we can then get a script runner into the picture and say please help because the scenario is more complex and the automation has a limit.
I noticed that the objects that you can set in an automation are around 256, and if you pass that number, Jira automation will not work. In those kinds of complex cases, we can call for our superhero script runner. Also, if there is another requirement, such as create a legal document after all of the HR process, like a signing document, we can also involve exporter from, I don’t remember the company.
Kerry: Not Appfire, but I’m sure Appfire has an app that does the same thing. These are high stakes, though. If you’re in HR or legal, and you set up your automation incorrectly, it could go badly, and these are important things.
Daniel: Yes.
Kerry: So, they’re easy to use. Are they easy to check before you go live to make sure that your automation is operating correctly?
Daniel: Yes. Normally, when there is a project recently created from scratch, we suggest to people to do the testing. So, there is a knowledge curve that the project managers need to pass in automation for Jira.
We strongly suggest to do it in sandbox. One, do it in sandbox. Two, change the color of sandbox so that you can realize that you’re working in sandbox, the whole environment will be in red instead of the regular blue of the default Jira. Turn off the outgoing notifications. These three things are basic for the project manager to stat playing with automation for Jira.
Once they feel comfortable, they can use it in production. Definitely, like Spiderman said, with great power comes great responsibility. I’m glad that everything is logged so we can see who did it.
Kerry: I hate that because it was always me. You mentioned legal and document approvals and reviews, things like that. What about service level agreements, what kinds of things can you automate?
Daniel: Definitely we can automate in setting the SLAs and send notification in certain SLAs. For example, coming back to HR, if there is an immediate termination, we can set to start sending notification. Even if it’s a legal something that a lot of people need to be aware of, we can trigger notifications to Slack channels or Teams channels from automation for Jira.
Those are easily configured by the PM. Well, it has to be with some team. For example, if they want to create a notification in Teams, they need to have the Teams owner involved to have some details, like the IP address and all of that. Once the automation is set, it’s easy to maintain, so they can change easily the message or they can add another action, like create an email to send to the security person that says, “Take these people out of the building,” or something like that.
Kerry: Definitely run that in sandbox first.
Daniel: Yes.
Kerry: Daniel, thanks so much. There’s a lot you can do with automation even if you’re not technical, even if your team is not technical.
You can learn more about Trundle and what they do at Trundl.com. You can see more episodes of The Best ITSM Show by Appfire at appfire.com/resources/resource-library/videos-webinars.
Thanks. We’ll see you next time.