Does everyone need to be an agent?
Asked by Andrew Conley:

We recently setup Jira Service Management for Incident Management. As heavy slack users, we've integrated a slack channel. It seems everyone internally who might work or be escalated a ticket needs to be an agent to be in this channel. What am I missing?

Our general organization/workflow:

Central Mission Control team triages customer incidents and serves as tier 1 support.

They escalate to on-call individuals from various engineering teams for tier 2. (we manage on-call rotation via Opsgenie).

We previously had a dedicated slack channel for incident management and each incident was managed in a thread. We've mirrored that approach with the JSM project. Using Assist, there is a dedicated slack channel where new incident jira's create threads and the comments bi-directionally synch between jira and slack.

So far, it we have to add everyone who will be on on-call rotation, their managers, etc. for them to interact with the incident threads in the slack channel. The only way they can be added is assigning them the "Agent" role in JSM.

That seems like overkill and something the "Collaboration" role in JSM would help with. What am I missing?


Answers:
author: Marc - Devoteam
body: Hi [@Andrew Conley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5281275)

To make it simple anyone who handles a JSM requests need to be an agent.

Collaborators can comment on issues, but can't transition.

Collaborators are licensed Jira users, so this can be users with a JSW (Jira Software) or JWM (Jira Work Management).

If you don't have these products, you are not able to use the collaboration role.

comments: author: Andrew Conley
body: We have JSW that everyone is a licensed user for. I read here that Collaborators was an old concept, however. I also could not add them to the Slack channel for commenting on the JSM jira. Only agents could be added.


author: Marc - Devoteam
body: It's not an old concept.

That concept is still very useful if you have teams solving problems, executing changes, etc.. but they are most of the time not JSM agents.

They work in JSW or JWM with their issues to accomplish the problem, change or other requests not able to be handled by service agents.

They can be collaborators on JSM issues and can comment on their progress. The agent can then relay with the customer.

As I read your comments on [@Joseph Chung Yin](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/396739) post, I also can't tell you how the integration with Slack would interpratate this.


author: Joseph Chung Yin
body: [@Andrew Conley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5281275) -

Hi Andrew:

I agreed with what [@Marc - Devoteam](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/3796976) suggested. The key is that an agent (one who handles/processes the JSM issues via the project UI) must have an agent license.

For collaborator users - they do use a Jira license (i.e. Jira Software) - they just won't use one of your JSM agent licenses. They will be able to comment as you mentioned, but they won't have access to the Queues or other agent-centric functions in your JSM projects.

I am sure that you already have this reference link on JSM project roles - <https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-are-user-types-and-roles/>

Hope this also helps.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Technology Applications Team

Viasat Inc.

comments: author: Andrew Conley
body: is there a way to make your slack channel setup for the agents not to be private, but open to your slack workspace?


author: Joseph Chung Yin
body: [@Andrew Conley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5281275) -

I am not sure what do you mean by public Slack channel setup and open to your Slack workspace? When a Slack channel is public, then it is not private (meaning everyone can join the channel if he/she wants to). This is not controlled/configured by JSM.

Please advise.

Best, Joseph


author: Andrew Conley
body: When you assign the slack assist bot via jsm to a slack channel, it forces you to create an agent channel that is private. You optionally can create a request channel that is public. If you attempt to add a slack user who is not an agent to the agent channel, the assist bot kicks them out because they aren't agents. This prevents placing collaborators in the channel.


author: Joseph Chung Yin
body: [@Andrew Conley](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/5281275) -

Thanks for your update that you are using JSM Slack assist bot in your process. I don't have enough experience with this type of Slack assist bot setup. I would recommend you to contact Atlassian Support (<https://support.atlassian.com>) for the support team to address your Slack assist bot question.

Please post their feedback, so others can also benefit for the knowledge sharing.

Sorry.

Best, Joseph


Tags: cloud

jira-service-management

jira-service-management-cloud