I stumbled upon Playbooks today by accident in my Jira Service Management settings and since I had missed the announcement I was first a bit puzzled. I went into the Release notes in my Admin section and sure enough there it was. No image, no real information and the link to the official documentation is not really providing any reason to look into this any further. Now that it has landed in my Jira Service Management instance though... Oboy, this is amazing!
What are Playbooks in Jira Service Management?
Well, the short answer is that is a combination of a checklist, an instruction and automations in one nice package. It behaves like Automations in that you create steps that can be either instructions or automations. You will find Playbooks in your Jira Service Management project configuration settings below the Automations. From there you will see the existing Playbooks so you can manage them. 
The Playbook itself can be setup with some conditions, which are very few at the moment. You can set up conditions based on issue type, request type and groups at the moment, and it would be great to also have other choices like custom field values and perhaps the check for Major Incident.
When you create the steps you can choose between Instructional and Automations. The Instructional option is quite straight forward where you will add information in a rich text editor that will assist the agent. There is a limit of 500 characters at the moment, which I assume is because they are just rolling things out as an MVP. In the future they probably need to change this as 500 characters is not a lot. You can of course add links to longer documentation and for now adding a link will just output the link so you can't use the internal linking feature to show pills or full embeds.
The Automation option allows you to add any automation in scope for the project. I think it will only allow you to pick the automations that have a manual trigger though. This makes sense since it will output a button for the agent to click, so other types of triggers does not make a lot of sense.
Once you have created the Playbook then all you have to do is to save it. If you have set up any conditions then those will determine when the Playbook will appear, but you can also add the Playbooks manually in the tickets. In your tickets you will see a new section for Playbooks marked with the New label.
Once you click to expand the Playbooks area you will see a list of Playbooks and when you open a Playbook you will see the steps. Each step will display the instructions and if it is not an automation, then you will see a button that says "Mark as done". For automations the button will instead say "Run". This is a great way to keep track of what you have done and a new way to add a checklist of things that you need to do for certain tickets.
Once you have completed the activities and clicked the buttons your actions will be saved in the execution log. The execution log is showing up both in the Playbook itself and in the execution log in the Playbook session of your project configurations. For now, it seems that if you press the button by accident, there is no way to revert that action!
Once the Playbook has been run you will find the result in the execution logs where you can see the result, who did what and when.
Are Playbooks in Jira Service Management useful?
Even though this is still very bare bone, and we need some additional love for it, I would say this will solve a ton of problems that people currently are struggling with. I had a conversation with a customer this week about a scenario just like this, and it is one I have had many, many times before.
This is very useful for incident management of course, but also for service requests and basically any situation where you want to ensure things are done in the correct order and to make automations a natural part of a checklist.
To me, this is one of the sneakiest and most awesome feature I have seen in a while!
Great work Atlassian!
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