How can I get rid of workflow statuses across projects?

Question

Hi all!

I need good advice on how to get rid of workflow statuses which have been created on project level while buidling a simple new workflow on a company managed .

It looks like existing statuses have been used from the dropdown menu during workflow creation, but their names have been altered to fit the specific workflow for this specific project.

This change of name has spread across multiple projects of all kinds - service, software and infrastructure.

It is now shown in user view on kanban boards, which is slightly confusing a few people who work in those Jira projects affected.

I was able to find the new workflow and kick out the statuses there. - However, they're still in our Jira instance and in those other workflows.

Thus far I wasn't able to figure out how to simply delete them on instance admin level. Is there any way to do this wihtout harming those workflows/projects where the altered status appear?

If there's no simple way, is there way at all?

Let me know if I was able to explain the issue clearly enough.

Happy to provide more context if needed.

Cheers,

Raimo

Raimo Neumann · Answer

Hi @Karan Sachdev!

Thanks thus far for your feedback.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's solving the issue. There's two challenges to overcome here.

Firstly, the original names of these statuses are unknown. Is there a way to find a unique identifier for each status that can be compared to the original default settings in Jira to at least rename them back correctly?

Secondly, even when renaming them to something similar as before, they still appear in some workflows in addition to the workflow statuses that were originally there.

E.g.,  the new status "Aufgabe2" (task2) appears in addition to the original "Aufgaben" (tasks). So in user view, they see two statuses that mean the same thing. However, the newly created tasks2 has somehow overridden the original "tasks-status" as initiating status...

Whereas, if you switch to the corresponding workflow scheme, the new status has just been popped in there, somewhat misplaced and detached from the workflow itself. And it isn't the initiating status either:

Do you have any idea how to clean that up again?

Looking forward to your response.

Cheers,

Raimo

Karan Sachdev · Answer

From your description, it is likely that while creating a new workflow one of the project admins renamed a status to better fit their project requirements.

However, since a status is a global entity, the rename took effect across the site.

So in future if you need to use a different status for a new workflow, you can create it by going to the above path, and then use this new one in the required workflow(s).

Karan Sachdev · Answer

Hey @Raimo Neumann

In terms of company-managed projects, Statuses are global entities.

So if you rename a status, lets say In Progress, in one of the workflows, the change will take place across all the workflows where it's used.

You can navigate to Settings > Work Items (Issues) > Statuses to manage the statuses. This is where you can see how many workflows each of the statuses are associated to. You can also revert the statuses to its original name and it will be reflected across all the workflows.

Thanks!