About requests and work items

In Jira Service Management, customers are people who request help from your service project. Customers can send requests to agents, and sometimes agents might raise a request on behalf of customers. For example, if an agent is taking a customer request by phone, they can raise their request on behalf of that customer. These requests are collected in queues as work items for your agents to work on.

What is a work item?

Work items are how pieces of work are internally represented in Jira Service Management to admins and agents. They could be customer requests or tasks created internally by agents. Different organizations track different types of work items, representing anything from a software bug to a project task or a leave request. Jira Service Management agents can assign themselves to work items or be assigned to them, either manually or using automation rules.

What is a request?

Requests are how work items are represented on help centers to help seekers, and are the items submitted by your customers or end-users. When customers submit requests for help, their requests automatically become work items that can be tracked in your service project. These work items are automatically triaged into queues, so you can easily find what you need to work on.

Request types
Request types let you define and organize incoming requests so your service project team can more efficiently help your customers. Phrasing request types in a customer-friendly way allows your customers to identify what kind of service or request they need quickly. For example, Purchase a new monitor, Get help with printers or Get wi-fi access.

The relationship between work items and requests

A work item and a request are two different views of the same unit of work. The external view a customer has is different than that of the internal view of the agent, so your agents see ‘work items’ while your customers see ‘requests’.

When customers submit requests through a help center or by sending an email to your service project, their requests automatically become work items that can be tracked in your service project. All comments sent via the help center or over email will be added to this work item.

To create a work item in Jira Service Management, agents can use the ‘Create’ button in the top navigation bar or the ‘Raise a request' option on the left-hand sidebar. We recommended that agents use the 'Raise a request’ option to create the request in a help center, or send their request by email, as this ensures the work item is assigned to a request type.

Request types and work types are the building blocks of requests. work types give your requests their foundational features, such as their fields and workflow statuses, while request types give your requests their specific settings such as naming and how they appear in help centers. A single work type can be the basis for many different request types. Learn more about configuring request types and workflows.

You can filter between different request channels by using the request-channel-type field. Learn more about the request channel type field in our advanced searching - fields reference.