Adding statueses in a company managed project

[Corey]

Hello, I have a company managed project. I am an Admin. Within other company managed projects, I see more statuses than I have available. Within mine, I only have three statuses - the same as exist in status category (to-do, done, in progress). How can I add more status categories to this project?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Corey 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Let us first clarify the terminology.

A Status is a value that is assigned to an issue.

A Status Category is a grouping of the Status values.

New Status values can be created. New Status Categories cannot be created.

There are three Status Categories. Every status is assigned to one of these categories, and the color associated with the category is the color used for the Status lozenge:

Status Category Name	color
To Do	gray
In Progress	blue
Done	green

As a Product Admin you can add new Status values from the global Issue Statuses page (click the cog near your avatar, then select Issues). This does not add them to any given project. It only makes them available to be used.

The Status values available for any given issue are determined by the Workflow used by that Issue Type in that project.

• A project has a Workflow Scheme associated to it. The Workflow Scheme is used to associate a Workflow to an issue type. In this manner you can have a different workflow for each issue type in your project. Or, 1..n issue types can share a single workflow.

To add more statuses to the workflow for the issue types in your project you need to modify the Workflow associated with the issue types in the project via the Workflow Scheme.

Note that Workflows and Workflow Schemes can be shared between projects, so if you change a workflow you may impact other projects.

In some cases you can add Statuses to a Workflow through the configuration of a Board associated with the project. This is possible only when the project uses a "simplified" workflow - one where an issue can transition from any status to any status without restriction.

If that option is not available to you, then you would need to go to the Workflow Editor to add Statuses and Transitions to the workflow.

More information on managing Workflows and Workflow Schemes can be found here:

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/create-and-manage-issue-workflows-and-issue-workflow-schemes/