Set up Workforce Management in Jira Service Management
This article walks space admins through enabling Workforce Management in a Jira Service Management space, connecting teams and services, setting up skills, setting capacity thresholds, and preparing for shift scheduling and routing.
Some features like services, capacity, schedules and skills are only available on the Premium and Enterprise plans.
You need space admin permissions to set up Workforce Management. If you’re a service agent, ask your space admin to complete these steps.
Before you begin
Before you turn Workforce Management on, decide:
Which service space Workforce Management applies to. Workforce Management is configured per space, so you can use it for some teams and not others.
Who is on your team. Add a team in Atlassian Teams and then link it to the space, either through the Teams app or through space settings. Your agents need to already be agents in the service space.
Where your services are recorded. Workforce Management routes work to the team that owns the service, so it needs to know which field identifies the service on a work item. This can be affected services, an Assets object field, or a custom field you have created.
Which skills your services need. If certain work needs particular expertise, list the skills involved so you can set them up and assign them to agents.
What "at capacity" means for your team. Workforce Management uses thresholds, for example a maximum number of open work items per agent, to flag when an agent is overloaded.
Step 1: Turn on Workforce Management
Go to your service space.
From the sidebar, select Space settings.
Go to Features, and toggle Workforce management on.
If you don’t see Workforce in Space settings, your space may be on a plan that doesn’t include Workforce Management. Contact your Atlassian admin.
Once Workforce Management is on, a Workforce entry appears in the space sidebar for admins and agents to use day to day.
To turn the feature off entirely, go to Space settings, then Features, and toggle Workforce Management off. Your configuration is preserved if you enable it again later.
Step 2: Connect your team
Workforce Management routes work at the team level. Every agent who can be routed to belongs to an Atlassian Team connected to your service space. You connect a team rather than adding individual agents.
You need an Atlassian Team set up first. If your team does not exist yet, create one in the Teams app, add your agents to it, then come back here. Teams created elsewhere in Atlassian can be reused.
From the space sidebar, select Workforce.
Select Team.
Select Connect a team, then pick the Atlassian Team you want to route work to.
You can connect more teams, or change which teams are connected, at any time. Agents added to or removed from a team in the Teams app are reflected in Workforce Management views.
If you currently organize people in groups, you can convert those groups to teams as part of this step.
Step 3: Connect your services
Workforce Management uses the service on a work item to decide which team should handle it. In this step you tell Workforce Management where your services are recorded, then connect each service to the team that owns it.
From the space sidebar, select Workforce.
Choose the field that identifies the service on your work items. This can be affected services, an Assets object field, or a custom field.
Review the services Workforce Management finds in that field.
For each service, select the team responsible for that work.
You can add routing context to a service to describe what it covers, for example that one service issues new software licenses and another resolves VPN issues. The more specific the description, the more accurately work is matched.
Services without a connected team cannot be routed automatically, so work items for those services stay unassigned for someone to triage.
Step 4: Set up skills
Skills let you route work only to agents who can handle it. Workforce Management uses skills as an eligibility filter: an agent who has the skills a service requires can be assigned that work, and an agent who does not is excluded.
Set the skills each service needs:
From the space sidebar, select Workforce.
For each service, select the skills required to do that work.
To add a skill that does not exist yet, create it, give it a name and description, and assign it to a category.
Then record which agents have those skills:
From the space sidebar, select Workforce.
Select Skills.
Select Edit mapping to see which skills are assigned to which agents and which services they are mapped to.
Assign skills to your agents.
If a service does not require any skills, every agent on the team passes that condition, and routing falls back to availability, schedule, and capacity.
Step 5: Set default availability and team capacity
Default availability is the status an agent has when they first use Workforce Management. Team capacity tells Workforce Management what counts as a full workload.
From the space sidebar, select Workforce.
Set the default availability for agents in your space.
Select Capacity.
Set how many open work items an agent can handle in each team.
Select Save.
The limits you set apply to every agent in the team within the space. You can change these settings later in space settings.
Step 6: Tell your team and plan next steps
Once Workforce Management is on and configured:
Set up routing. Decide whether to route work manually or automatically. See Route work to the right agent in Workforce Management.
Build your schedules. Plan when each agent is working so routing knows who is on shift. You can create schedules individually or import several at once. See Bulk import schedules using CSV.
Watch capacity for a week. Go to Capacity utilization, visible to admins only, to see whether your limits match how your team actually works. Adjust if needed. See See your team's capacity in Workforce Management.
Was this helpful?