An approval in Change Guards names a person. Only that person can answer it, and only once. Those two facts are what separate an approval from a checkbox somebody ticked.
Requesting an approval
- 1
Open the change
On the issue, in the Change Guards panel, select Request an approval.
- 2
Pick the approver
The list comes from Jira’s own assignable-user search for this project, so a candidate can never be somebody with no business seeing the issue.
- 3
Say what capacity they are approving in
Optional free text — “Service owner”, “Security”, “Change manager”. It appears next to their name in the record and in evidence exports.
- 4
Send it
A comment goes on the issue naming who was asked. Your own Jira notification scheme handles telling them.
Requesting the first approval moves a draft change into in review automatically — there is no separate button to remember.
Answering an approval
If a request is addressed to you, the panel shows a comment box and Approve and Reject buttons under your name. Nobody else sees them — not even a project administrator.
- 1
Read the change
The issue itself is right there — description, comments, links and attachments. The panel adds risk, planned window and freeze state.
- 2
Add a comment if it needs one
Optional, but it is what the person reading the evidence in a year’s time will want. Conditions, caveats and what you checked all belong here.
- 3
Decide
Your decision, your comment and the timestamp are appended to the audit chain before the approval record is updated.
What happens next
- All approvers approved → the change can be moved to approved, provided no freeze window blocks it.
- Anyone rejected → the change goes back rather than sitting in review looking like it might still pass. Somebody has to act on it.
- Still outstanding → the panel shows how many people have not answered.
Approving during a freeze
You can approve a change that sits inside a freeze window, but the change cannot then move to approved until the freeze is dealt with — either the change is rescheduled, or a project administrator records an override. The panel tells you which window is in the way and why it exists.
Emergency changes
An emergency change can be approved straight from draft. In practice the useful sequence is: record it, do the work, then get the approval recorded as soon as somebody is available. The audit trail shows the real order of events, which is more useful to an incident review than a fiction where approval preceded the fix.