Jira Project: Workflow and board relation

[Marta Sliwinska]

Hi

I have a question about workflow and boards in 1 projects. Is it possible that configurated workflow for the project/type issue (i.e: Task) is: Open - in progress - done. But for the project team the additional steps are needed: Open - in progress - testing - approved - done and they can't change the workflow. Is it possible they can create a board and add vertical columns for Testing and approved? What will be the consequences?

[Jack Brickey · Accepted solution]

Hi Marta, welcome to the community.

With the boards the columns represent one or more statuses in your workflow. In CMP statuses map to your columns. You can’t map the same status to multiple columns. So in short, well you could have more statuses in your workflow that you do have columns the reverse is not possible.

Is there a reason why you don’t want to update your workflow to match your process flow? Or am I misunderstanding your goal?

[Marta Sliwinska]

Hi Jack

Thanks for your reply

Answering your question, workflow is managed centrally by Jira admin and it's common for all projects. It is hard to find workflow that suites for every team. I try to find the way, team can customize the way they work and what statuses they have. 

If I understood you correct. Possible situation is when workflow has 5 different statuses and board 3, but it is not possible that workflow has 3 statuses but board 5? How I should understand the statement that I found here: Get started building an agile workflow | Atlassian, that teams can share simple workflows but have different representations of the process on their agile board - is there other way to give team more flexibility?

Best regards

Marta

[Jack Brickey]

Yes you understand correctly. As for the article I can’t say definitively what they might be getting at but I suspect it is simply stating what you currently understand. That is, let’s say I have five statuses one team might choose to represent that with three columns another team might represent it with four columns and finally a third team might represent it with five columns. However you can’t represent five statuses with six columns. It simply doesn’t make sense you can’t map a single status to two columns.

[Marta Sliwinska]

Thank you Jack, everything clear now;) The team can name their statuses in boards how they want?

I still have problem what to say teams who want something different (more complex) than workflow :) Maybe additional question about the relation between workflow and boards. I believe workflow is overriding (parent) to boards? What is other role of workflow besides modeling the process of work - which can be done by the boards) - reporting, etc?

Best regards

Marta

[Jack Brickey]

Yes but it is better to say that the team can label their “columns” however they want vs. “statuses”. This is simply because the column labels may or may not equate to the actual status names.

If a team wants a different workflow then you simply need to create a unique workflow for them. Now, workflows are associated to issuetypes so within a single project you can’t have two workflows for the same issuetype. If you have two teams working within one project that want different workflows then you simply need to have different issuetypes assigned so that you can therefore create different workflows for them. If the teams are working on different projects then you can certainly to find different workflows for the same Issuetype name.

[Marta Sliwinska]

So, what am I missing when I create new workflow for different project/team. Why do I need workflow pre-configurated relative to board? I still would like to understand the role of workflow ;)

[Jack Brickey]

one important matter we have nor broached is what type of project is this? CMP OR TMP?

my responses thus far have been assuming CMP…

Maybe this will help - what-are-jira-workflows

or this - create-a-board 

Or this - configure-columns