Explore roles for a service project
10 min
Beginner
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Explain what tasks agents, collaborators, customers, and project admins can perform
- Explain what tasks request participants and approvers can perform
- Define customer organizations
Grant access with project roles
In Jira Service Management, project roles control how people access and interact with a service project. Project admins assign users to roles to give them specific permissions. These are a few typical roles:
- Customer
- Agent
- Collaborator
- Project admin
- Stakeholder
👇Click the tabs below to learn more about each of these roles.
A customer is an unlicensed user who requests help from the service project. There are two types of customers in Jira Service Management.
Internal customers are employees who raise requests to an internal service desk using the portal. They typically don't have access to the project itself, just the portal.
👉 For example: A new hire at your company submits a request through the portal for help setting up their computer.
External customers can only access the customer portal as they don’t have a license for Jira Service Management.
👉 For example: You work for a software company. A customer submits a request through the portal for help troubleshooting an error.
Both internal and external customers can:
✔ Raise requests through the portal, email, chat or a widget
✔ Track their requests in the portal
✔ Communicate with agents through the portal
✔ Add attachments and comments to their requests
✔ Read knowledge base articles
✔ Approve other customers' requests
✔ Add other participants to their own requests (if allowed)
Project admins can also create custom roles to meet a team’s needs.
👉 For example: The Omega team wants to limit who can create new queues, so they create a role called, “IT manager.” Only users with the IT manager role can create queues.
A service project will likely have many agents, collaborators, and customers, and can have one or multiple project admins, depending on the team’s needs.
Remember that permissions or access works along with product license. Granting a role does not necessarily mean they have product access or a license.
Share requests with other people
There are two other kinds of people that interact with requests: request participants and approvers. These users don’t need to have a specific project role or a Jira Service Management license. They just interact with specific requests as needed.
👇Click the tabs below to learn more about request participants and approvers.
Agents and customers can add people to requests as request participants. By default, they receive the same notifications as the reporter of the request.
👉 For example: A customer created a ticket for a product change. They want to share the request and its status with other members of their team.
👉 Another example: A customer requested new hardware that doesn't need approval. They want to share the request with their manager to keep them informed.
Request participants can:
✔ View, comment on, and receive notifications about the request
✔ Add or remove other participants
✔ Escalate tickets
✔ Add attachments
Manage customers with organizations
You can invite an unlimited number of customers to service projects, so it’s important to keep them organized. Jira admins can create groups of customers, called organizations, that agents and project admins can use and share across multiple service projects. A service project can also have more than one customer organization.
There are several, additional benefits to using customer organizations:
- Jira Service Management tracks the number of requests received from each customer organization.
- You can provide different levels of service to different organizations.
- You can use organizations in search and filters. This empowers you to create queues, reports, and SLAs for a specific organization!
- Agents can add customer organization as participants on requests.
- Customers can search for requests made by others in their organization.
- Customers can add members of their organization as participants on requests.
👉 For example: Acme Corp is an external customer organization that needs to be able to submit tickets for both IT and billing-related questions. They have been added to multiple service projects, IT Help Desk and Billing Help Desk.
👇 In the example below, Acme Corp is an external customer organization that has been added to multiple service projects.
Project admins can set Channel access to either Open or Restricted:
- When set to Open → Anyone can submit requests to this project.
- When Restricted → Only people directly invited to this project can submit requests.
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Organize your work in Jira Service Management
- Navigate your queues
- Bulk update work items
- Filter work by request type
- Monitor your SLAs
- Link related Jira work items
- Monitor due dates on your calendar