Kanban board without workflow change (multi-project)

Question

Situation:

We are working in a multi-project environment (4 Jira-projects) and have to track stories which are located inside those projects. 
All projects have their own complex workflow for these stories.

Since our tasks are mostly independent from those workflows, we want to use our own Kanban board to structure our doings around the stories.

Problem:

We can create a Kanban Board with all relevant stories, but are not able to switch stories between columns, because that will force changing of the workflow status.

We thought about integrating Trello to create independent boards, but first I wanted do ask the community, if there is a solution which we can use directly in Jira.

Jack Brickey · Answer

That is not how Kanban boards work in Jira at all. The board is a visual representation of the issue statuses and allows drag-and-drop transitions thru statuses. As you mentioned maybe there is a way to integrate your Jira project w/ Trello, dropping all issues into lists. I have never done this TBH so can't really offer any help other than suggesting searching the Community and Googling.

Florian Kouril · Answer

We already have our own project to work in and create own boards for example.
The problem is that we would need something like a Kanban board that does not change the status of the story.

To be a little bit more specific.

For example -> Stories A,B,C (simplified Workflow: Open -> In Refinement -> Ready for Sprint -> In Progress -> Dev Testing -> Dev Approval -> Testing -> Done)

Our Kanban board should be independent from those statuses, since we work as a shared service in QA for all projects and our tasks do not effect the development directly.

Kanban board columns could be like.

"Relevant" or "To Do" / "Test data needed" / "Market config" / "Test case creation needed" / "adjust Test automation" / "Functional Testing" / "Done"

We already tried to just use specific labels or sub-tasks for our doings but we don´t get the level of transparency we need.

So basically we have our own workflow for those stories which runs simultaneously with the existing one. But there is no logical relationship between those workflows. Sometimes the only thing we have to do is prepare specific test data, sometimes we have to do all the tasks in order.

I hope this answers your question......

Jack Brickey · Answer

I'm confused. If you need to work issues inside these 4-projects then you will be leveraging the workflows and statuses configured. You can certain create your own board for this but yes if you drag-and-drop issues between columns then the status will change that is how it works. I'm clearly missing something so maybe you can help me better understand. One last comment...if you need to do work outside of these projects just create a new project.