Atlassian Update – October 2025
Hi everyone,

As always, thank you for watching, commenting and engaging with us on this ticket.

We're happy to announce that as of today Approvals is now available in all Company managed projects (CMP) both business and software for Jira cloud premium customers. To learn more please check out the community article here or watch this quick demo of how to set up and use approvals in CMP projects. Note this means that approvals is available for all project types in Jira excluding team managed software projects.

We'll leave this ticket open for a while to gather feedback on the new experience before closing it and creating more nuanced tickets if there's still outstanding feature requests you'd like to raise.

Thanks again for your patience and support

Ben - Product Manager, Jira.

Problem Definition

As per configuring JIRA Service Desk Approvals, at the moment, the Add Approval feature can only be used for Service Desk project and it is not possible to use it with Software or Business project.

Suggestion

It would be great if we can have the Approval feature for Software and Business project as well like what we have for Service Desk project.

Workaround

• Add an approval step using Jira Software and Work Management

Alternate Workaround :

If you need to simulate an approval process in Software or Business projects, you can leverage Automation + Custom Fields + Status Transitions:

Steps:

1. Create a custom field (e.g. “Manager Approval”) with options such as Pending, Approved, Rejected.

1. Add this field to the screen used during the transition you want to control (for example, “Ready for Deployment” or “Move to In Progress”).

1. Set up an Automation Rule:

• • Trigger: Issue transitioned to the “Awaiting Approval” status.

• • Action: Send an email or Slack notification to the approver(s) with “Approve” or “Reject” smart links that update the custom field.

1. Use workflow conditions to check if “Manager Approval” = Approved before allowing transition to the next status.

1. Optionally, add a JQL filter or dashboard gadget to track all issues pending approval.

This workaround mirrors the behavior of Jira Service Management approvals while keeping everything within Jira Software or Work Management, without requiring a JSM license.