Keep Jira Service Management requests moving while an agent is on vacation

The problem

Requests assigned to an agent stay in their name while they are away. Colleagues either do not notice, or reassign by hand and nobody remembers to give the work back. And telling the team someone is away should not tell the customer.

Step by step

1. Covered projects. An administrator adds the service desk project to the projects the app works in and keeps the policy on “reassign all open issues”.
2. Request. The agent requests the vacation in their personal settings and picks a colleague from the same desk as substitute.
3. Approve. The team lead approves it in the approval queue, or it is approved automatically if approvals are off.
4. Cover. Within the hour after midnight on the first day, in your reference timezone, the agent’s open requests in that project are reassigned to the substitute. The app records which requests it moved.
5. Inform. Anyone opening such a request sees who is covering. If someone assigns a request to the absent agent, an internal comment follows; the customer never sees it in the portal.
6. Hand back. Once the vacation is over, the requests the substitute still holds go back to the agent.

What to watch out for

The substitute must be assignable in the service desk project, which in practice means an agent there, and the absent agent must be allowed to assign issues there. Requests the substitute cannot take are skipped and counted on the agent’s own page. Requests still waiting unassigned in a queue are not touched, and requests assigned to the agent after the vacation started stay with them and get the warning comment.