We all have more to do and remember to do than we can easily keep track of and occasionally things get missed. Do you know Jira can help you remember to complete a process or remind you of an upcoming deadline?

Jira has a powerful workflow engine that we leverage for the management and tracking of business processes. But sometimes people start a process and forget to finish it or the person required to do the next step lets it sit without action. So we created automated Jira reminders and dashboards to keep people informed and keep processes moving.

One of the processes we have automated is the Travel and Expense authorization (T&E) process. People who need to travel for business will create a T&E approval task prior to booking their travel to get authorization to spend to money. Once they have all the required cost estimates they submit the T&E for review and approval. We found that many times a request sits in the “Waiting for Submittal” status even after all cost estimates are entered because people forget to click the “Submit” button to send the T&E for approval. To address this we created a Jira filter to identify all T&E approval tasks that are in the Waiting for Submittal status.

Filter: Waiting to Submit

(reporter = currentUser() OR assignee = currentUser()) AND status = "Waiting for Submittal" AND issuetype = "T & E Approval" ORDER BY created DESC

We now had a list of every T&E Approval that was waiting for submittal. To send a notice to everyone in the list we simply subscribed all Jira users to the filter and had it send a notice just before lunch every day.

Subscription:

Problem Solved! Well mostly solved. Now we saw that some managers needed to be reminded to approve or reject the T&E approval requests in a timely manner.  Since the manager does get a notice from Jira when the T&E is assigned to them for approval we only needed to remind them when it had been in their queue for a couple days. To do this we created another filter and added a dashboard showing T&E Approval requests waiting for approval for over two days by manager.

Filter: T&E Approvers Waiting over 2 Days

Project = "Finance" AND issuetype = "T & E Approval" AND status in ("Awaiting T&E Budget Approval", "Awaiting T&E Client Approval", "Awaiting T&E Department Approval") AND Status changed from "Waiting for Submittal" before startOfDay(-2d)

The great thing about subscribing a Jira User Group to a filter that uses “currentUser()” is anybody in the group will get the notice but only if they have an entry in the list. No notice is sent to anybody without records in the list. You can use this feature for sending many types of reminders and let Jira automation free up your time. We have also seen that an automatic notice from Jira is accepted by some people who object to a person sending them a reminder.  So let Jira be your AutoMagic Genie to keep things running smoothly because we all need some AutoMagic in our lives.