See all workflows and map status columns in business project boards

[#1]

Hi everyone,

I’m Amy Cheong, a Product Manager on Jira Cloud, and I’m excited to announce two big improvements coming up to business project boards – part of our journey to harmonise boards across Jira.

What’s new?

• View all workflows in one board: No more toggling between workflows. Now, every work item – regardless of workflow – appears together on your board. If you want display specific workflow on board, you can filter by work type.

  • Customize board according to specific workflow: Admin can created multiple view tabs within project using the Add view option in the horizontal navigation [Read more here]

• Map multiple statuses to columns: Project admins can now map several statuses to a single column, making it easier to reflect your team’s real process.

  • To use this: 

    Select More actions (...) or the settings ⚙️ icon at the end of columns then Configure columns. 

• Hide unwanted statuses in the board: Project admins can now hide statuses from the board by moving the unwanted statuses to the hidden statuses column. 

These changes help teams – especially those with complex or cross-functional workflows.

What’s next?
We would love your feedback. Try it out and let us know:

• Does this make your board experience better?

• Are there other board features you’d like to see?

Drop your thoughts below or reach out directly – your input shapes what we build next!

Thanks for helping us make Jira even better,
Amy & the Jira Cloud Team

[YY Brother]

Hi @Amy Cheong 

> Map multiple statuses to columns: Project admins can now map several statuses to a single column, making it easier to reflect your team’s real process.

I love this feature. This week, my customers are complaining about the flexible board column order.

For a global/freestyle workflow,  jira business project board will display different column order for different users. They wanna to fix the board column order and rename the column name just like the one from company-managed projects.

So how to apply for it for my customer to use as early users of this feature?

Thanks,

YY Brother

[Susan Hauth _Jira Queen_]

@Amy Cheong , this is fantastic.  I never understood why the jira business project board was so different and sub-standard to the jira software project boards.  My users will be so much happier with these improvements.  Thanks for listening!

Susan

[Denver Durham]

@Amy Cheong  This is a very disruptive update. This complicates everything that we have built for jira across many teams in our services organization. The board view is now confusing and virtually useless. We constructed our team workflows based on issue types with unique statuses, and toggling between workflows worked well and aligned with team SOPs.

PLEASE at least provide an admin option to revert back to workflows.

[Edie Hovermale]

This was a half baked feature release and should not have been deployed. The idea is great but the board shows all statuses and are not filtered down when users filter for work types. What a mess. My users are mad. :-( 

I had to move one of the business projects to software so my team could work. At this point we may move all business projects to software projects. I don't see the value in business projects... except the background coloring.

[Amy Cheong]

@YY Brother  Amazing! If you wish to have early access to this feature, feel free to reach out to our support so that we can enable feature for your site to test it out. 

[James Rickards (SN)]

Whilst this will be good for some projects to allow a single overview, what I want is to be able to choose to setup unique boards to suite each specific stream of work. As it stands, I think I'll still need to setup business projects as Jira Software Company Managed projects where several unique boards are supported.

[Amy Cheong]

@Denver Durham @Edie Hovermale 

In Jira Business Project Board, you can still view your work items according to specific workflows by filtering your board by work types. After that, you could collapse those statuses that are irrelevant to the workflow at the top right of the column.

If you wish to hide the status completely from the board, you can move the statuses to the hidden status column in the configure column. 

This is example, all work items with "Bug review status" will be hidden from the board. 

If you are an admin of your project, you could add in a new board view and set a default view for different set of users. 

Please reach out directly to me so that I can understand your use cases better. 

[Matt Di Berardino]

@James Rickards (SN) Hi from Atlassian 👋

what I want is to be able to choose to setup unique boards to suite each specific stream of work

It's actually possible to do this today in business projects. A project admin can create up to 5 separate board tabs in the project via the plus button at the end of the project views navigation:

Each board can be saved to have a different default setup and a unique name for the tab to describe what they represent for your team. Additionally, with this new feature being rolled out, these settings now also include showing or hiding different statuses and columns through the new column configuration modal:

This gives you great flexibility to adjust each board to bespoke workflows and processes, as these settings only apply to the current board you are viewing. Each board can receive individual configurations.

I hope this helps. Please do not hesitate to reach out if you need more details about these new features.

[Denver Durham]

@Amy Cheong an appropriate roll out would have been to provide the option and let users know before the change went live. Waking up one morning and seeing that ll of my teams jira projects are a mess is terrible service from your side. My teams manage several different ticket types each with very unique lifecycles, and all of our building/configuring of workflows and SOPs have been based on the Workflows feature. Please help me understand why there is not an admin option to toggle this on/off?

[James Rickards (SN)]

Thanks @Matt Di Berardino ! Good to know. I'll post a tip of the day to our Project Admins.

I guess my feedback has changed is please consider why I couldn't figure this out, and why none of the users I just talked to could intuit it was possible either.

Firstly, the navigation approach is inconsistent between the team managed and company managed projects, and this has been made worse since the navigation refresh. IMO, switching boards shouldn't be done from the top navigation bar. We can look at the two approaches side by side, it is so much more intuitive and faster to choose your board from the left tree style navigation bar.

With Jira Software, and JSM you expand the list of spaces, then move the mouse a tiny bit to expand the boards/queues then click once to go directly to where you need to be. The add board button is right next to the space/project settings button. This is also consistent with how Confluence works.

With JWM you need to click on the space/project, wait a few seconds for the default screen to load, then move the mouse across the screen to find and click on the board.  It is much more effort/load on the user.  Then the add button is in the top right side of the screen, which is not where people intuit it.

I see a use-case where the JWM top navigation bar is better for users that work only on a single space/project, and only on less than five types of work, so I get why the designers put it there, but the inconsistency is a killer for usability once you step up adoption of Jira within the business.

If you must keep boards in the top navigation bar, I suggest an update to the wording on the button to "add board", rather than just "board". We typically hide as many of those top buttons as we can to reduce cognitive load on newer users, and seeing "board" after clicking the "+" just looks like it's adding the existing board back to the top navigation bar.  I just checked our trial monday.com instance and this is exactly how they make it easy to see you're adding a new board. Our business users are clamoring to move to monday.com due to subtle things like I have just mentioned, and also the ability to leverage colours.  Colours are especially important to users switching from Excel across to Jira where colour is heavily used to convey information quickly.

[Matt Di Berardino]

@James Rickards (SN) thank you for sharing this feedback with us, it is truly valuable! I shared it internally with our user experience and product management teams and it will be considered for our future updates to Jira.

[Smaricic Daron]

Ok, I am trying to understand this. First, the speed in the animated images are far too fast. 

Is this for projects (soon: spaces) that have work item types with different workflows? So that a board in this project still can show all of them together? Is this is what this is all about?

[Ryan Pardue]

This is the most disruptive update I’ve ever seen in a cloud product. Our organization had a board configured to function, essentially, as a service desk. This board included the default workflow scheme for most departments, but we also had several departments with highly customized workflows and statuses for their issues. These departments would toggle between workflows to view their issues and transition their tasks through their processes. By combining all of the workflows and statuses onto a single board, it has resulted in utter chaos.

The columns can be updated by anyone, so the first department to notice this change, thinking that something was wrong with their browser, went in and customized the board with their team’s columns, which completely confused the other teams that interact with issues on the board as their issues seemingly disappeared when their columns/statuses were removed.

My team jumped in and tried to solve for this, creating custom board (tabs) in the project that aligned to the workflows/columns that were previously accessible via workflow selection. Unfortunately, the limit of five boards meant that we had to consolidate statuses into columns, which do not always overlap. This has resulted in an overwhelmingly negative user experience, it has prompted documentation rewrites, and required multiple 1:1 guidance sessions.

Further compounding this issue is that in our haste to restore functionality as best we could, we inadvertently deleted the default “vanity” board, which then caused a 404 when people accessed their bookmarks to /board because the custom board tabs we created are referenced with ID’s like /board/WyXyyZy and there is no way to restore the default /board.

Not every team works the same way, and the beauty of Jira before this update was that it allowed us to accommodate multiple teams with multiple processes in a single project, without having to deliberately bake in workflow/status overlap. It seems those days are over.

[Denver Durham]

@Amy Cheong this feature should be optional to toggle on within each project. Also the column customization should be limited to project admin only.

[Matt Di Berardino]

@Ryan Pardue @Denver Durham we apologize for the disruption this feature rollout may have caused to your teams workflows. I have shared your feedback with the relevant teams.

Regarding the ability to remap columns, I can confirm this feature is restricted to project administrator roles only already.

[Matt Di Berardino]

@Smaricic Daron that is correct, this feature allows to see all issues together on the business project board view without being segregated by workflow. This brings consistency to the business project board with the software project board behaviour in this regard.

[Evgenii]

@Matt Di Berardino , @Amy Cheong this update has completely disrupted the way our teams use Jira. After spending weeks fine-tuning workflows and board layout for different workflows to match our operational processes, this change renders much of that work obsolete. The new board view shows all statuses across workflows with no intelligent filtering, making it cluttered and confusing.

We built our entire tracking system around issue-type-specific workflows, where each issue type had clear, isolated status transitions that reflected their actual process. Now, all statuses are merged into a single pool, regardless of relevance. Filters don’t respect workflow context, so users see irrelevant states, leading to mistakes and miscommunication.

Teams are frustrated, productivity is down, and we’re getting constant complaints from project leads.

At the very least, there should be an admin option to revert to the previous behavior. Forcing such a drastic change without warning or opt-in options undermines trust in the platform. This level of disruption shouldn’t happen without a clear migration path and user control.

[Ryan Pardue]

Regarding the ability to remap columns, I can confirm this feature is restricted to project administrator roles only already.

@Matt Di Berardino Thanks, Matt. Unfortunately, that's not what we've found in our environment; I just logged in as a user who does not have administrative privileges on the board in question, and I was able to remap the columns and publish those changes as that user.

[Matt Di Berardino]

@Ryan Pardue the column mapping feature is limited to users with project administrator privileges on the given project. If you experience something different please raise a support request so our support team can have this investigated on your site. Thank you.

[dominique_schlott]

Atlassian's attempt to unify board both from more standardized software projects as well as more individual business projects is a bad idea in my opinion. Just the fact that they unified their products "Jira Software" and "Jira Workmanagement" into "Jira" is not reason enough to just ignore the individuality of business projects.

I'm absolutely not amused with the current situation and i would sustain the already expressed request to have an Admin activate/deactivate option for a board segregation/unification.