JSM Automations (and ACP-420 study session)

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Hey all - last week I had a live study session for the ACP-420 Automations (full video embedded below). Automations are found across Jira, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery, and Confluence, automations are your digital assistants, taking over repetitive tasks so you can focus on other things.

Personally, I rely heavily on automations, especially within Jira Service Management. From ticket assignment using load balancing rules to automatically generating Confluence pages and managing content lifecycle with labels they help save me a ton of time. There's a lot more to automations though - imagine automatically creating Jira tickets from published Confluence pages, triggering sub-tasks with a single click, integrating with other tools via webhooks, or seamlessly updating issue statuses.

Honestly my biggest challenge with automations is making the time to understand what they can really do.

Ready to explore the power of automation? The best way to learn is by doing! Every tier of Jira Service Management Cloud offers automation capabilities (though the number of monthly runs varies). Take a moment right now to open your Jira instance and explore the "Automation" section. You should also browse the available templates – they're a fantastic way to understand what's possible and even get started if you're unsure where to begin.

Identifying Automation Opportunities: Figuring out what to automate can be a massive hurbe. I usually start by looking at my daily (or my team's) routine and pinpointing tasks that are repetitive and follow clear steps. Once I have a list, I prioritize the most time-consuming or tedious ones. When working with a team, getting their input is crucial. They often have a better perspective on time-wasting activities and can become enthusiastic about finding more automation opportunities.

Understanding Automation Scope: Automations in Atlassian have two main scopes: Global and Project. Global automations, managed by Product admins, can run across your entire instance or a selected set of projects – similar to how schemes work. This is incredibly useful for consistent processes across multiple similar projects. Just remember to communicate the existence and function of global automations to avoid confusion! Project automations, on the other hand, are specific to a single project and can be created by both Product and Project admins. This allows individual teams to tailor automations to their unique needs without impacting others.

At the heart of every automation are triggers (what starts the automation) and actions (what the automation does). Optional components like conditions (controlling when an automation runs) and branches (allowing actions on multiple related work items) add even more flexibility. Think of triggers as the "when," actions as the "what," conditions as the "if," and branches as the "for each."

Finally, remember the audit logs! Jira records every automation run and configuration change, making it invaluable for troubleshooting. I highly recommend adding an action to your automations to log specific information, making future debugging much easier.

Check out more info below!

• More information on automations
• Playlist of all the ACP-420 study sessions I've done