How to design Workflow correctly

[Alexey Gusev]

Hello everyone!

I would like to receive some advice, recommendations, or simply opinions from the community regarding the following situation:

In Jira Server ver. 9.4.3, there is the following Workflow associated with a certain type of task, which is in turn linked to a scheme used in a service project:

As you can see from the "Second Line Support" status, there is a transition to the "Information Request" status. This is done for cases when a second-line employee needs to clarify something with their colleagues in related departments of the company (accounting/purchasing/logistics, etc.).

In turn, the employee from whom we requested information can only respond to the request using the corresponding transition.

But here's the problem: a situation may arise where the employee we requested information from needs to request information from another employee.

If we allow changing the assignee at this step, through status properties or by creating a transition:

the process may get stuck at one status and eventually lead to a breakdown in the workflow.

What is the correct approach to enable both re-requesting information at the "Information Request" step and properly returning the request to the workflow, i.e., returning it to the second line?