Overview

JIRA has two patterns for issue assignment:

1. You know who to assign the issue to, and you assign it to them
2. You put the issue in a queue and hope that it is picked up in a timely manner

Neither of these approaches suit the needs of a scalable, high performing IT service management team.  

Elevator for JIRA is designed to make sure that your issues are being dealt with by the right people and teams as quickly as possible. It is simple to use and you will be up and running in no time. Here is a quick overview of its capability to get you going.

Rosters

Rosters are where you tell Elevator for JIRA what team issues will be allocated too or what individual is going to be on call and when. Rosters represent your real world people and teams that you need to action issues.

Elevator for JIRA gives you immense flexibility with 2 roster types.

• Escalation rosters that allow you to assign issues to your on-call support staff. Please see Selecting a Roster Type to get your Escalation roster up and running.
• Team Allocation rosters give you the power to intelligently distribute work across your service teams. Meaning you can choose to spread the work evenly across your team, or target an individual in a team until they hit a configured threshold. Please see Selecting a Roster Type for examples on how to get your teams up and running.

Users and teams Schedules and Team Shifts are highly flexible meaning you can rotate people and teams hourly, daily or weekly etc.

See Setting up a Team Allocation roster and Setting up an Escalation roster for more detail.

Escalation Roster Tiers

Each roster must have at least 1 tier to define the schedule and on call users. Multiple tiers allows you to have a safety net for when issues are not addressed in a timely manner.

By setting up multiple tiers Escalator for JIRA is able to detect unacknowledged escalated issues and re-assign the issues to the on-call  users in the next tier.

Allocation Roster Teams

Each roster must have at least 1 team to allow work to be distributed either evenly or by targeting specific teams members. An optional target workload gives the team's flexibility to make sure team members have manageable workloads throughout their shifts. 

Escalations

Issues are escalated by your JIRA users or automatically through workflow/Service Desk Automation and assigned to a Roster. Elevator for JIRA knows what team or user is on-call for a Roster and will assign the issue to them.

Issues are acknowledged by your on call users and teams which lets everyone know that the issue is being looked at.

Issues are completed by your on call users and teams when they have finished with the issue. Completing an escalation will assign the issue back to the original user who escalated it.

See Understanding the Escalation process for more detail.

Issue Management

If no Escalation or Team roster users are available to take an issue i.e users hit maximum allocation or the selected user or team are yet to start their shift, then Issues are will remain queued. Once the roster starts or the rostered user is available issues will then be assigned accordingly.

Elevator looks every 60 seconds from when issues are queued for available rosters and users.