How to convey the status of my user's change request to my non-technical users?

[Edwin]

Hi all, good day. My team and I are relatively new users to Atlassian products. 

This might sound a little like a communications question, and that is partially true. As a software developer, I am trying to figure out how to communicate ideas and concepts over Jira, in particular the state of a change request.

Background

I have few projects and a service management project (ITSM). My team is structured in such a way that we have someone dedicated to replying to our users (let us call him Level 1 Support or L1S for short). 

Besides incident tickets such as unable to login etc, sometimes my users would send us a change request ticket - that is perhaps adding a functionality or changing certain workflow for a project. L1S would pass these tickets to me to evaluate and work on it. 

I think the way to approach this would be to create a work item from this ticket in ITSM to link to the relevant project. This would involve creating Epic related to this change request, and then create the Tasks for it such as 'Meet users to discuss change request', 'Create add to cart functionality', 'JUnit test for add to cart functionality', 'UAT for add to cart functionality'. 

Use Case / Question

Now, when the ticket reporter (users) or Management asks L1S what is the state of the change request, because L1S is not a software developer and is not directly involved in development, he has no good way to evaluate what is the progress of this change request. Currently, he is only able to reply to the ticket reporter that the item "is in progress", or using the progress bar shown under the Epic that it is 70% green (which does not always translate to 70% complete, and the other party does not have a good way to grasp what does 70% mean).

Besides having a daily "10 minutes" scrum standup where my team gives an update to L1S about all projects and the state of the change request, or letting my L1S hop over to my developer's desk at any time to get a status update (which might be a 'no update, currently working on something else'), what can I do to help my L1S - and by extension my users; have a better idea what is the state of the request?

Any suggestions? 

Should my team change our workflow? Should I expand our Epic's status workflow? Should we change how we name our epics and tasks? Or should we just tell our users to look at their ticket's status.

[Bob Dalm]

Hi @Edwin,

There's no simple answer. I guess it will be a combination between managing customer expectations (how long do standard changes take? what is considered a standard change, and what might take a bit longer?) and training the teams to give an indicative estimation of when items can be delivered. This could of course be registered in the Epic and conveyed to the customer.