What is hardware work?

Hardware work is how your team acts on hardware — procuring it, assigning it, repairing it, transferring it, auditing it, and disposing of it. Each of these activities is tracked as a work item in Jira Service Management, so there's a clear record of what needs to happen, who's doing it, and what it relates to.

Work items are raised from hardware request types — the ready-made request forms that ship with hardware asset management, such as Request new hardware, Request hardware repair, or Procure hardware. When someone raises a request, a work item is created and moves through your team's workflow — for example, from To do to In progress to Done.

Hardware work items connect back to your inventory: a work item can reference the specific hardware, model, or stockroom it's about. As work items are completed, automations can update your hardware — for example, changing an asset's status when it's assigned or disposed of — so your register stays in step with what's actually happening.

How automations create and progress hardware work

Not all hardware work starts with someone raising a request. Automations are the engine behind hardware work — they create work items, move them through their lifecycle, and keep your hardware register up to date. They fall into four kinds, based on what triggers them:

• Request-driven — triggered when someone submits a hardware request type. These create and track the work item and update the linked asset (for example, submitting Procure hardware or Request new hardware).

Automations don't map one-to-one to request types. A single request type can trigger more than one automation, some automations aren't tied to any request type (they run on a schedule or event), and some request types don't have a dedicated automation. Think of request types as one of several front doors to hardware work, and automations as what turns that work into tracked, up-to-date activity.