Jira Cloud - On call schedule - Round robin assignment
Asked by francis:

Hi,

Probably someone asked this question before, but I can't find something that is matching my requirement  

**The context**   

I'm setting up a schedule for assigning issues to a group of support engineers, active in 3 time zones (AMER / EMEA / APAC)  

Each time zone has 2 engineers active during their work hours. The way that we define the schedule, some hours have overlaps between timezones.  

![Google Chrome 2024-08-11 12.34.08.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/341106i8E08C2DA2A43E023/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Google Chrome 2024-08-11 12.34.08.png")

With Jira Automation, newly created issues get automatically assigned to the on-call engineer

**The question** Given that at certain time slots - multiple engineers are 'on call' how can automation be setup to assign to one of these engineers in a round robin fashion  

<br />

<br />

<br />


Answers:
author: Jack Brickey
body: Hi [@francis](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/781580) , you can certainly assign round-robin with JSM but I don't believe that is available in Jira. Assuming you are using JSM I would approach as follows.

* trigger - issue created
* condition - if/else for each time slot
* action inside each if/else Assign using round robin based on a "time zone support group"

![IMG_4451.jpeg](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/341109i33A0D6B1EE3AE969/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "IMG_4451.jpeg")

comments: author: Bill Sheboy
body: Hi [@francis](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/781580)

Adding to Jack's suggestion...

My understanding is when automation rules use round-robin (or balanced) assignment, that is tracked *at the level of a specific rule* . And so if a single rule uses conditional logic to select users from different groups, the assignment is unlikely to be balanced as expected. *(If an Atlassian team member knows differently, please respond with more information. Thanks!)*

I suspect JSM has features to handle this situation, regardless of rule, Issue Assign Action behavior.

Without JSM, one rule workaround for this would be to create multiple rules, which check the condition for assignment. Then the round-robin will be tracked by each rule. And so for your scenario, you may need 5 rules, and the workload will be round-robin for the users assigned for each group used.

Kind regards,  
Bill


author: francis
body: Thanks all.

The fact that we can use the on-call roster in the assignment logic is a huge win. With the 'Balanced Workload' approach, the group of users is static and issues might be assigned to users who are not available.  

<br />

I will have a look at the Smart Assignment app that [@Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/1164057) suggested.


author: Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_
body: Hi, [@francis](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/781580) ? I hope you're well.

I agree with [@Jack Brickey](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/853369)'s response. However, there are a couple of marketplace apps that you may wish to explore.

[https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=cloud\&product=jira-service-management\&query=Rotations](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?hosting=cloud&product=jira-service-management&query=Rotations)

Full disclosure: I work for the company that makes one of the apps in the search results.   

-dave


Tags: jira-service-management-cloud

round-robin