How to manage tasks and workflows in Jira for beginners?

[Harry Wilson]

Hi everyone, I’m new to Jira and currently trying to understand how it works in real projects. I know the basics like creating issues, but I’m still confused about how tasks actually move through different stages in a workflow.

[Chris Hampshire]

Hi @Harry Wilson 

Welcome to using JIRA for Projects. JIRA can be used to manage end to end projects in a way that makes sense to you

In its most basic form, JIRA works by having a series of JIRA Issues (cards) which you can use for anything which you can move through a workflow such as To Do, Doing and Done (or any combination of flows)

There are many types of JIRA tickets and some exist within a heirachy, To read more about this, please visit here. Epics, Stories, and Initiatives | Atlassian but a simple set up could be

INITIATIVE - The name of your Project

EPIC - The name of your Project Milestones

STORIES - The tasks that help to deliver on the project milestones.

For a real life exmple, I'll use booking a holiday as a sample project

• INITIATIVE - Book a Holiday
  • EPIC - Finalise holiday destination
    • STORY 1 - Establish Long List
      • Sub Task - Research xxx website
      • Sub task - Discuss with xxx Travel Agent
    • STORY 2 - Establish Short List
      • Subtask - review with family
    • STORY 3 - Cost Review of each short list

Your question is quite broad but I hope this gives you a flavour

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Harry Wilson , we might need a bit more information about your actual questions here to ensure we're hitting the mark. With that said, let me provide the following to get us started.

you create workflows in your project to align with your needs. For example, you might have one simple workflow To Do -> In Progress -> Done and another To Do -> In Progress -> Review -> Done. You transition issues thru these stages/statuses as the work progresses to completion. There are multiple ways of causing the transition based on what scree you are looking at. 

If this doesn't help, can you elaborate on "how tasks actually move"?