How to Save a Jira Service Management Request as a Draft

JSM has no native draft for portal requests. See how a Draft status and Feature Bundle’s Customer Actions let you finish a request before submitting it.

Celina Kuziemko Nov 8, 2023

Jira Service Management doesn’t have a native draft for portal requests. A common workaround is a Draft status in the workflow: the request is created as a draft, the customer completes it later with Feature Bundle’s Edit Request, and then moves it to Open. Agents start working only when the request has all the information they need.

Without drafts, customers submit what they have, and agents start with follow-up questions. Here’s how one team avoided that.

Jira Service Desk as One Source of Truth

The dev team uses a planning poker app and has noticed it keeps crashing. The topic was brought up at the retrospective. Scrum master John decides to pass this information to the project admin. Project admin Tom decides it is necessary to report the problem to the vendor, and that’s what he does.

The Flow: 5 Steps

A banner at the portal with a pleasant message about filling in all needed information.
Tom fills in the fields where he is sure: app name, hosting, and instance URL. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the app’s license number. He also doesn’t know exactly what the plugin’s instability manifests as, so he leaves these fields blank and creates a ticket. The ticket is created as a DRAFT status. If he doesn’t want to add anything to it, let him click the SUBMIT button. However, Tom knows that he needs the support of his colleagues to make the submission rich in information.
Tom joins two people: Greg, who is the site admin, and Beth, who is the dev team leader. Tom can share the ticket thanks to the native Jira functionality Share with. Greg enters the request, clicks Edit request, and fills in information about SEN. Beth, on the other hand, describes the problem in detail. After each action, a comment is added to the task, stating who edited what field and when.
Tom enters the request, clicks on the Edit request button, and completes the Project type field additionally - company-managed software. On this screen, he also chooses to change the status to OPEN.
The ticket appears in the queue for requests in the OPEN status. The agent can work on this with all essential data packages; all concerned are already added to the ticket.

Save Jira request as draft

How to Set It Up

In the workflow of your request type, add a Draft status and make it the status new requests start in.
In Feature Bundle, create an Edit Request customer action available only for drafts (JQL: status = Draft). Add the fields customers may fill in later and the Status field, so they can move the request to Open when it’s ready.
(Optional) Add an announcement banner to the request form, asking customers to fill in everything they can.

If you don’t use apps, you can leave a JSM form open after submission, so customers can return and add information. In that case, the request is already in the agents’ queue.

Benefits of Draft Requests in Jira Service Management

Agents with access to all necessary data: They have all crucial information in the ticket.
Agents don’t get stuck due to waiting for answers: Without repeated follow-up questions, they can resolve tickets faster.
Meeting SLA faster: Happier customers!
No rush decisions: Reporters can take their time to collect information and save tickets as drafts.
Editing requests prevents making mistakes or filling in wrong data: When it happens, the reporter can edit ticket (admin decides who, when, and how many times it can edit).
One source of truth: Without other channels, side conversations - all at once in the right place with notification for all concerned.
Transparent communication: It makes it easier for the agent.