Approvals in Jira Service Management: How to Display Approval Data with Great Gadgets

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In many organization approvals play a vital role in ensuring that processes are followed correctly, compliance is maintained and decisions are well-documented. Therefore, approvals are a critical part of many workflows in Jira Service Management. Whether you’re handling IT service requests, change management approvals or internal workflow approvals, Jira’s approval system allows designated approvers to accept or reject tickets before they move forward in the workflow.

In this article, we’ll explore how Approvals in Jira Service Management work, how to activate them and how you can efficiently track and visualize approval data using the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets for Jira and Confluence.

What are approvals in JSM?

Approvals in Jira are a built-in feature that allows designated users to approve or reject specific issues before they can proceed to the next stage of a workflow. This functionality is used in Jira Service Management (JSM) projects, where teams handle requests that require formal authorization, such as IT service requests, access permissions or change approvals.

How do approvals work in JSM?

Jira Service Management allows you to integrate an approval step into a workflow status, ensuring that specific requests go through a structured review before progressing.

When an approval is required, you can designate one or more approvers, who will be responsible for reviewing the issue and will either approve or decline it. Based on their decision, the issue will transition to the appropriate status in the workflow (e.g:moving from “Waiting for Approval” to “Approved” or “Rejected”). This ensures a structured, transparent and auditable decision-making process within your organization.

To be able to add an approval status to a workflow in your Jira Service Management project you need to be a Jira administrator. Once enabled, approvers will be able to approve or decline issues. See more informations on how to add an approval step to a workflow here.

Display real-time statistics about Approvals

Once an approval process is integrated into your workflow, generating reports becomes essential for monitoring its effectiveness. With the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart  gadget offered by Great Gadgets for Jira and Confluence you can create customized reports and multi-dimensional stats that provide insights into your approval workflows.

Display Approval Status by Project

Use the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets app to track Approval Status across different projects in Jira, allowing you to understand which projects have the highest number of approved, declined or pending issues. This will help teams identify trends in approvals and spot potential bottlenecks in the approval process of each project.

Display the Total Number of Approvals per Member

Another way to use the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets is to track the total number of approvals made by each designated approver in Jira. This allows you to see who has approval responsibilities across team members and identify who is handling the most approval decisions.

Additionally, you can configure the gadget to show the total number of Declined or Pending issues per person, offering a comprehensive view of the approval workflow.

List the issues along with their Approvers or Approvals

By using the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart Gadget offered by Great Gadgets, you can also generate a report showing each issue along with its approvers or approver groups.

Or maybe list the issues with the persons who approved.

To use this gadget only to list issues, as in the examples above, you should configure it to not display the totals or the average column. This can be done by unchecking the appropriate options on its More settings tab.

With the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget, you can choose to visualize the approval data not only as tables or heat-maps, but as various charts as well: column charts, line charts, bar charts, stack area charts or pie charts.

How to configure the Pivot Table and Pivot Chart Gadget to show stats by approvals?

Here is an example on how to configure this gadget to show approval stats per project in form of table heat-map:

• Add the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget to your Jira dashboard
• Enter a suggestive Title
• At Data Source, select the Filter or enter the JQL that returns the issues that serve as input data for the pivot table or pivot chart. If you want the sub-tasks from the selected filter or JQL to be included, check Count also the sub-tasks and their estimate
• At Fields, select Approval Status and Project fields. (*If you want to select one of the multi-value fields – fields marked with the [≣] symbol – note that only one field of this type can be selected at a time).

• In the top-right cell from the Output configuration section, select Table as the type of the output data. If you want to display the results as a heatmap table where the values of interest are highlighted in shades of red, select Table Heatmap. If you want to display the results as a chart, choose the appropriate option for the type of chart you want
• By using drag & drop, place the issue fields that you want to be displayed on the columns and the rows of the table
• Click Save

Conclusion

Managing approvals efficiently in Jira is key to ensuring compliance, accountability and smooth workflows. By using the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget from Great Gadgets for Jira, you can gain clear visibility into your approval process, tracking who approved or rejected issues, how many requests were approved or declined and how many are still pending. With the right data at your fingertips, you can ensure a structured and transparent approval process that keeps projects moving forward efficiently.