How do workflows link/work together?

Ralph R April 1, 2015

Apologies if this has been answered before but I cannot find an answer anywhere.

I have been tasked with moving our entire agency (Client Services, Project Management, Studio Management, Creative, UX, Development, Q&A) into Jira. To do this I have determined an appropriate workflow for JIRA for each department.

However I am struggling to understand how these workflows will link/work together.

For example: A brief is created by the client services team which will go through Open -> In Review -> In Progress -> Complete When the brief gets to in progress this is where work is created for other teams (New Projects for the Technical Department, Brief review for the Project Management Team, Resource allocation for the Studio management team etc.). Once this work is completed it can then move to complete.

Are there any examples/blogs/articles about this? or even better what questions should I be asking?

Thanks in advance

2 answers

1 accepted

1 vote
Answer accepted
Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 1, 2015

I'm not sure what you mean by "link together"

A workflow describes a process than an issue goes through.  In JIRA, that is tied to the issue type and project.  So you'd create a workflow for Bug and associate that with Bugs, then all the bugs raised will follow it.  You can have different workflows for projects and issue types (so a bug in project A might follow bug-workflow-1 and a bug in project B follows bug-workflow-2).  It's all tied together with what JIRA calls "workflow schemes".

It sounds like you've got your workflows designed already, so it should be just a case of creating a project (or set of projects) for each department.

Unless you want do do something else, like shared projects, in which case you're going to need to start thinking about how you splt the work out or merging workflows.

Ralph R April 1, 2015

Thanks for the above answer Nic, I will try to explain further. I know you can't link workflows together in JIRA and also that a workflow is a series of states an issue goes through until it is closed. What I am asking is how these separate process can be set up to work together. for example: A brief is created by the client services team which will go through Open -> In Review -> In Progress -> Complete When the brief gets to in progress this is where work is created for other teams (New Projects for the Technical Department, Brief review for the Project Management Team, Resource allocation for the Studio management team etc.). Once this work is completed it can then move to complete. Would this be manual, or could it be automated using Jira?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 2, 2015

>this is where work is created for other teams I think that's the crux of it. You probably want to create other issues for the other teams to work on at that point. That can be automated - there are several addons which enable "automatically create issues" as post-functions (As usual, I'd use the script runner for the maximum flexibility). You'd need to decide whether you wanted 1. Separate issues: Advantage - can go in any project. Disadvantage - only very loosely linked to the original 2. Sub-tasks: Advantage - you can easily do things like "stop parent progressing unless child issues complete" and "roll up time logs to parent". Disadvantage - they have to be in the same project under the parent (In both cases, you can use different workflows for the new items)

1 vote
Joe Pitt
Community Leader
Community Leader
Community Leaders are connectors, ambassadors, and mentors. On the online community, they serve as thought leaders, product experts, and moderators.
April 1, 2015

Workflows don't link together. They are all the steps an issue of that type takes from open to close.

kari hale May 1, 2019

Thanks, I had the same question. I will just add the workflow steps from both to a new workflow. 

Suggest an answer

Log in or Sign up to answer