Is it better to use a common workflow between tasks and subtasks?

[Nathan Peterson]

Currently, we use a simplified workflow for sub-tasks which is a different workflow from regular tasks. I think the intention was to simplify things, but it seems to make things more complicated. For example, I have a task where I am debugging something, and one of my subtasks is to send a testcase to a vendor, which is blocked because I am waiting on the vendor to give me details about what kind of testcase they need. Whenever we are waiting on vendor, we need to use the "Pending Vendor" status, because that is something that is tracked by management. The problem is that subtasks do not have a "Pending Vendor" status. I do not want to move the parent task to "Pending Vendor" because I can still make progress on debugging. Only the subtask itself is waiting on vendor, and plus the subtask is stuck in "In Progress" status even though I am not making progress because it is waiting on vendor.

IMO, it is kind of confusing in general to have different workflows for different statuses. I can see where sometimes you would need to do that, but in this case I don't think we have any reason to. The feedback that I got from IT was: "In general it is not our best practice to give sub-tasks complex workflows." and that using a common workflow "adds additional overhead to users." IT is assuming that using a separate workflow for sub-tasks is better in general. I'm wondering if they just have never used subtasks (they have subtask disabled for their jira tickets) because it seems obvious to me that the opposite is be true, that a common workflow is better unless there is a good reason not to.

What do you guys think?