Enhance Existing Workflows with Maestro AI

The Problem

Our customer is a long-established organization with a mature and deeply integrated suite of software tools. Their users are well trained, systems are stable, and long-term software vendor contracts are already in place. As a result, replacing or restructuring core tools to meet new business requirements is not a practical option.

Like many organizations, the customer regularly collaborates with external vendors, contractors, and members of the public during the design, development, and evaluation of their products. This introduced a critical challenge:

How to maintain [their] current suite of software tools and still allow external participants to provide crucial data back into [their] environment without having to create discrete user accounts for every external participant?

When you need external participants to provide input into your product development processes, traditionally you would create an account in your internal system for the vendor, user or customer to log in to. In this use case, Jira. The customer had to create an account for every external participant in Jira in order for the participants to provide crucial feedback.  Why is this a problem you ask?  Simple!  You are expecting external participants to manage their user accounts in your system and even learn the ins-and-outs of how you use, in this case, Jira.  This became an administrative headache for the customer and the external participants in the customer's product development processes.

The Requirements

The customer uses Jira as the central system of record for all issues, requests and interactions, ranging from internal IT tickets to external inquiries. To support their evolving processes, they needed a solution that would:

• Automate feedback loops required by their internal processes which would in turn alleviate the need to create and maintain external user accounts.
• Allow their internal users to keep using Jira as they always have.
• When a Jira ticket changes status, that data should be sent to a workflow and automatically determine what to do with it such as involving external participants or not. If external participation is required, determine the best workflow to send to the external user without having the need to create a user account for them.

Using Maestro and Maestro AI, we delivered a fully self-managed solution that met all requirements without disrupting existing systems.

The Outcome

Using Maestro AI, we were able to create a solution which:

• Used existing capabilities of Jira to launch Maestro AI-enabled workflows.
• Used Drupal and Maestro to create workflow templates which were chosen via Maestro AI based on the Jira ticket and Jira workflow status.
• Sent external participants a Maestro task which they could complete anonymously and return that data back into the Jira workflow.
• Eliminated the need for the customer's IT and project management teams to pay for, manage and maintain user accounts for external participants, thereby saving cost and aggravation.

We configured Jira to directly feed its data into a Maestro AI-enabled workflow.

As a result, the customer eliminated the need to provision, manage, and secure external Jira accounts, reducing costs, administrative overhead and security risk.

By connecting Jira webhooks directly into Maestro AI workflows, the organization offloaded external data collection to Drupal and Maestro using a simple, low-code parent flow. The end result was a more secure, more efficient process that preserved existing tools while enabling seamless external collaboration and saved money in the process!