Keep Everyone in the Loop: Introducing Stakeholder Groups & Automation for Incidents

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Keeping stakeholders informed during an incident is crucial and increasingly complex. As service teams grow, incidents can affect a broad range of stakeholders, including internal teams, external partners, customers, and leadership. Unfortunately, relying on manual email updates, ad-hoc distribution lists, and disconnected tools can hinder communication and create confusion.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that Jira Service Management Premium and Enterprise plans now offer enhanced incident stakeholder management features to streamline your communication during incidents. 

Note: Some features, including stakeholder management directly in Jira Service Management and reusable stakeholder groups, are being rolled out gradually. If you don’t see them yet, they’ll be available in your instance soon!

What’s new?

Here’s how the new features help you modernise and scale your stakeholder communications:

1. Manage stakeholders directly from Jira Service Management 

Previously, only organisation administrators could add stakeholders through “admin.atlassian.” Now, Jira administrators can add stakeholders directly within Jira Service Management, streamlining workflows and reducing reliance on organisation administrators. 

2. Create reusable stakeholder groups 

By defining stakeholder groups—like “Exec Sponsors,” “Network Team,” or “Customer A Contacts”—once, you guarantee that every member of each group is always included in incident communications. This means you’ll never accidentally leave someone out: whenever you select a group for an incident, all its members are notified automatically, every time. This approach eliminates manual errors, saves time, and ensures that the right people are always kept in the loop for every incident, now and in the future.

 3. Associate stakeholders and stakeholder groups with services & incidents

Associate stakeholders and groups directly with specific services and incidents, so only the people who need updates actually receive them. No more spamming uninvolved teams with irrelevant alerts.

4. Instant, Reliable Stakeholder Communication—Powered by Atlassian Automation

Easily keep key people informed during incidents with the new “Add stakeholders to incident” automation in Jira Service Management. Automatically or manually add stakeholders—ensuring they receive timely updates and visibility throughout the incident lifecycle. Available for Premium and Enterprise plans. Read more about how to configure it here.

5. Standardise and simplify stakeholder email updates to stakeholders

Leveraging existing incident email templates to send concise, relevant updates to relevant stakeholder and stakeholder groups. Templates help standardise communication, reduce manual effort, and minimise errors during high-pressure moments.

 

Why this matters?

These new capabilities give service teams a smarter, more scalable way to communicate during incidents. Instead of scrambling to update various stakeholders manually, you can now:

• Standardise stakeholder comms with templates

• Improve transparency without overwhelming recipients

• Save time and reduce risk by keeping updates in one place

• Tailor messaging to the right people—every time

Get started

• 📖 Read more about stakeholders
• 📖 Learn how to set up stakeholder groups
• 🛠️ See how to associate stakeholders with incidents and services
• 📨 Create and manage email templates

What’s coming next?

We’re continuously working to make incident communication even more powerful in Jira Service Management. Here are some exciting features on our roadmap:

• Create status pages directly from Jira Service Management: Soon, you can create public status pages within Jira Service Management and send real-time incident and maintenance updates to your stakeholders—all included in your Jira Service Management Enterprise app. Share this update with others in your organisation.

• Early Access Program: Interested in trying out status pages before general availability? We’re running an Early Access Program! Sign up here.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to expand and enhance incident stakeholder management in Jira Service Management.

[Dave Mathijs]

Thanks for sharing @Deeksha , these Operations features and capabilities are ever-expanding!

[Josh]

Hi @Deeksha .

I just reviewed this page: Create stakeholder groups | Jira Service Management Cloud | Atlassian Support .

It appears that these stakeholder groups are managed separately from Atlassian groups and Atlassian teams? Will org admins have any visibility / oversight for the stakeholder groups?

[Deeksha]

Hey @Josh , 

Yes, stakeholder groups are managed separately from atlassian groups and atlassian teams as the stakeholder groups can have external users also part of the group. Org admins can manage stakeholder groups from the JSM UI. 

Also any user added from JSM UI as a stakeholder will also be synced to admin.atlassian and org admins can manage the stakeholder from there as well.

[Rune Rasmussen]

This looks very interesting.
A couple of questions though.

1. Is it, or will it be, possible to connect Stakeholder Groups to actual groups?
We would like to provision these groups through our idp using dynamic groups.
We only use Jira for "internal stuff", and it is a requirement that all users are provisioned through our idp.

2. If the groups will not be provisionable, will there then be automation actions to help us manage the Stakeholder Groups?
I'm looking for hope that we won't have to 100% manually manage these group memberships.

3. Any plans to let us customize the "Services" Assets Schema? Or let us connect other Schemas to the Services/Operations features?
We desperately want to use these features, but with the embarrassingly constrained nature of Services we simply can't use it, and it's just another feature we can't use but pay for.

[Josh]

Thank you for the clarification and prompt response, @Deeksha!

There's been a general trend to make all user / group configurations available in admin.atlassian.com . I hope these stakeholder groups will soon follow that trend. Having to switch over to specific apps to manage user / group memberships (even if they have a fancy name like "Stakeholders") is an anti-pattern for admin workflows.

As I find myself often doing these days, I concur with all of @Rune Rasmussen's observations and questions above.

[Todd Thomas]

This looks great, @Deeksha!

One question- you mentioned that in the future we could create status pages from within JSM. This would be amazing. Is that an Enterprise-only feature or will it be available to Premium customers, as well?

[Kevinsmisth]

That’s a really practical update improving communication flow like this can save a lot of confusion during incidents. It reminds me of how study visa consultants in Islamabad simplify complex processes by keeping everyone clearly informed at each step.

[Deeksha]

Thanks @Rune Rasmussen for your questions. 

1. I have created a feature request to sync Stakeholder groups to atlassian groups. We do not support this today since atlassian group has licensed users added to the groups, however stakeholder role can be assigned to users who do not have any paid license for the product. 

2. We will soon be releasing API's to ensure stakeholder group management becomes easy. Feel free to also set up time using this clockwise link to discuss stakeholder group management use cases in detail. 

3. We are working on introducing one service catalog in March'26 which should help resolve this issue here. You can also use this link to discuss your pain points with the team.