How to use custom fields instead of statuses to control SLA in Jira? [Use Case]

You should discover the use case below if you’d like to calculate and control SLA in Jira with custom fields rather than statuses. Recently, one of our  SLA Time and Report for Jira users made the request. We came up with an intriguing approach, and discussing this case with the community members will be beneficial.

🧐 How can statuses be replaced by tracking time for each value under a specific custom field?

For instance, the “Departments” custom field in the issue tickets has four values: “Dep1, Dep2, Dep3, Dep4”. These departments can all work together for a while on the same problems. The custom field’s value in the Task is changed whenever one Department takes the place of another.

We want to know how much time each Department spent on these duties so we can report that information as it’s shown below.

👉Using SLA Time and Report, you can create various SLAs in Jira with customized parameters for your field values.

SLA Report and Time for Jira by SaaSJet is the app for creating reports for Jira, which allows you to define, monitor, and report time to SLA for your Jira issues.

How to control SLA in Jira with custom fields and track the time spent on each value in a specific custom field? Let’s look through the step-by-step guide below:

1. As many configurations as values, you can create for your “Reported group” custom field. Jira settings allow you to add custom fields.
2. Take the “Departments” custom field, for instance, which has 4 values (Dep1, Dep2, Dep3, Dep4). Four SLA configurations should be created in the SLA Manager, starting with the first value and Stopping with any others.

Create a second configuration for the following Department and save it.

Repeat the same actions for the 3 and 4 configurations.

With these configurations, the first config begins to operate as soon as a particular Jira issue has the first Dep1 value. It continues to do so until this issue changes its value to another one. The second configuration run calculates the time when the custom field changed Dep1 to Dep2.

3. Then, Go to the Main page and Switch to the Table view.

It’s necessary to choose only the four SLAs with the “Department” label here. Simply enter the required number of configurations.

4. You’ll get the issues’ remaining time (depending on the time target you have entered in the configuration) and elapsed time displayed in a table. The elapsed time provides the precise amount of time it takes to solve this task.

The issue QA-99, in this instance, consumed 101h30m under the value of the “Dep2” custom field.

Note! If you would like to track only the Jira time spent for each issue, you can use the Time in Status for Jira Cloud add-on. Choose the filter you need and get the results according to the chosen criteria.

Your team “A” spent N hours and N minutes in the mirror scenario.

5. If you want to get only elapsed time info, you need to export the table and keep only the ‘Elapsed time’ columns there.

Additionally, you can adjust the goal-setting time based on the team’s skill level. Moreover, if you would like to configure Jira Custom fields with SLA, we recommend you to discover our informative article: Configure Jira Custom fields with SLA Time and Report for Jira add-on.

What alternative to control SLA in Jira would you prefer? Please let us know if you found this solution useful.

You can start the 30-day free trial to discover all advantages of SLA Time and Report for Jira and ensure how helpful it functions for you.