Automating ticket assignment to a group in JSM

[Sebastian Santoyo]

We are looking to automate ticket assignment in Jira Service Management, but we found a limitation: Jira only allows assignment to a specific user, not to a group.

This creates a practical issue:

-If we automate assignment to a fixed user, there is a risk that the person is on vacation or unavailable.

-As a result, tickets may pile up without being attended, causing SLA breaches.

We have considered leaving the assignment manual as a healthier option, but we would like to validate with the community if there are best practices or recommended alternatives for this scenario.

Specific questions:

1. What is the best practice for handling assignment when the request should go to a team or group rather than a single person?

2. Are there any native JSM features that allow rotation (round robin) or balanced assignment across team members?

3. What alternatives have other teams applied to make sure tickets do not remain orphaned during vacations or absences?

Any guidance or experience would be greatly appreciated.

[Mario GELES · Accepted solution]

HI @Sebastian Santoyo 

You can use automation to auto assign an issue to a person in a group using one of this method :  balanced workload, round-robin or random. 

Specific answers : 

1. When a request should go to a team rather on person I think the best practice is to have some queue and let the member of the team assign the issues themselves (that's how we work in my compagny)
2. You can do this with automation (see screenshot above)
3. You can use JQL to see what issues didn't have any update or comment during a certain amount of time and you can use this JQL in an automation. Same thing to check unassigned issues. 

[Sebastian Santoyo]

Good, is that an external app or addon?

Some community champions said is not possible... but what you show looks quite interesting

[Mario GELES]

Hi @Sebastian Santoyo 

It's not an external app nor an addon, it's already in Jira.

What is not possible is to have a group of people as reporter but you can have one reporter selected among a group of people. That is the automation I showed you

[Tuncay Senturk _Snapbytes_ · Accepted solution]

You're definitely not alone in facing this challenge and JSM doesn't natively support assigning issues directly to a group or team. Using sub-tasks or queues can help distribute work visually, but they don’t solve the core problem of automated smart assignment especially when considering availability, rotations, or balanced workloads.

if your team uses Opsgenie or has an on-call rotation already set up, that could be a great fit for escalation or after-hours support — especially for incident-type tickets.

As @Mikael Sandberg mentioned there are apps on the Marketplace and, I’d recommend checking out the free app SnapAssign of our team. It was built specifically to tackle these kinds of limitations. 

• Automatically assign tickets based on team membership and availability

• Configure round-robin or load-balanced distribution

• Define working hours, time off, and shift schedules

• It works well in both Jira Software and JSM environments.

(I’m part of the SnapAssign team, so happy to answer any questions or help you get started!)

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

Currently as you have noticed it is not possible to assign to a team. There is a suggestion to be able to do this, check out JSDCLOUD-106.

At my previous job we used the on-call schedule in Operations to assign tickets to our agents,  which I wrote about in this article. Trundl makes an app that is similar in functionality, Smart Assignments & Rotations and there are other apps in the Marketplace that can reassign a work item if the assignee is OOO.

Another workaround could be to utilize Assets and set a custom field to the team that should be assigned to the request.

Teams are changing and you can now associate a team with a group, so you could set the team field based on membership and then organize your queues around teams.

The question still exist, if you assign a ticket to a team, how do you know who on the team is working on it? That is why Jira is using a single assignee, and if you need to divide the work into smaller chunks for other people to do that chunk then you use sub-tasks to do that.