Does JIRA Cloud support for nested workflows

[Marek Dziedzic]

Hello,

I am very new to JIRA and am hoping that some pretty advanced functionality is available within the tool since it has been around for a long time and from my understanding is extremely configurable.

I am looking to create nested workflows with individual views/boards in JIRA. This is what I am trying to do:

Primary Workflow: (start to end of a single task)

New -> Creative -> Development -> QA -> Done

Creative Workflow: (tasks that enter "Creative" above, start the workflow below)

Ready for Creative -> Copy -> Design -> Creative Review -> Creative Done

Development Workflow: (task that are Creative Done are moved into the beginning of the Development Workflow)

Ready for Development -> In Development -> Development Review -> Dev Done

QA Workflow: (tasks that are Dev Done are moved into the beginning of the QA Workflow)

Ready for QA -> Dev QA -> Creative QA -> Internal Review -> Client Review -> Ready to deploy

The goal is that each workflow has its own Board so that each team can focus on the tasks that are assigned to them AND that there is a high level board that the Project Management Team can review.

In a more complex version of this, there would actually be a set of workflows above this that would be client based where ideas for projects/tasks could live and then enter the Primary Workflow once they are sold into the organization.

Is this possible in JIRA?

[Ryan Fish]

@Marek Dziedzic

Possible, yes. Transparent, maybe.

In order for a user to view an issue with a specific status, then the board must contain the status in configuration/ columns/ column management. You can have any number of boards "nested" by figuring out your workflow as you have already.

• Each board needs to have a status to pass an issue to and from another board
• Status names should be unique to each board, and should not duplicate across boards
• The last (right most) column of each board must contain a "closed" status

e.g. In your original post, a user moves an issue through the life cycle.

Given:

Board A columns would include:

• New -> Creative -> Development -> QA -> Done
• A/ Done column contains the status of B/ Ready for Creative, which "passes" the status to the next board

Board B columns would include:

• Ready for Creative -> Copy -> Design -> Creative Review -> Creative Done
• B/ Creative Done column contains the status of C/ Ready for Development, which "passes" the status to the next board

etc...

A couple of agile questions to ponder:

How does the complex multi-stage workflow outweigh the benefits of transparency or simplicity? What are the administrative cost?

How do the teams benefit from operating on independent boards instead of a shared board?

Some reading material:

Configuring columns

Workflows

Working-with-workflows

[Marek Dziedzic]

Thanks @Ryan Fish,

Do you now if the new next-gen projects support this? I believe that you cannot develop multiple board at the moment.

Additionally: are workflow statuses and board columns independent? (ie: can you have a board column name "X", that contains workflow status "Y"? In your explanation above, you say:

• A/ Done column contains the status of B/ Ready for Creative, which "passes" the status to the next board

Does that mean that Board A's right most Column can include a workflow status X AND Board B's left most Column can include the same workflow status X? Or would the columns and workflow statuses all have to have the same name?

Pertaining to your Agile question - definitely valid. We're discussing the pros/cons of having a very granular workflow from start to finish that would simply force the board to be extremely wide with a lot of columns (and therefore be difficult to see in full). I suppose we could solve this with several monitors side by side in our stand up area, but I am also aware of the annoyance of always having to scroll to the Left of Boards when they first load if you just want to know what's in your department, or what you need to work on today.

A more specific example would be that our Marketing Department wants to track all of their projects, so they have things that are high-level ideas, require executive buy-in, etc. and then finally are ready for production. Our head of marketing is not interested in the details of what stage of production a specific project is, just to know that of the 10 projects she's working on, two are "in production" and the other 8 are in other stages of their lifecycle.

[Ryan Fish]

@Marek Dziedzic

I am on 7.7 and it works fine on my boards, I cannot comment about next-gen specifically as I have not used.

Allow me to re-state the column/ status relationship, any column on any board can include any status. The explanation is a bit long. 

Based on the OP workflow. The Primary Board shows high level status. Bold items are the columns in the Primary workflow, italics are statuses in the Primary workflow.

• New ->

• Creative -> (Ready for Creative -> Copy -> Design -> Creative Review -> Creative Done)

• Development -> (Ready for Development -> In Development -> Development Review -> Dev Done)

• QA -> (Ready for QA -> Dev QA -> Creative QA -> Internal Review -> Client Review -> Ready to deploy)

• Done

Then each Secondary Board (Creative, Development, QA) has the statuses as you stated, Bold is Secondary Board name, italics are statuses. Columns names TBD.

• Creative -> (Ready for Creative -> Copy -> Design -> Creative Review -> Creative Done)

• Development -> (Ready for Development -> In Development -> Development Review -> Dev Done)

• QA -> (Ready for QA -> Dev QA -> Creative QA -> Internal Review -> Client Review -> Ready to deploy)

Columns on the Secondary Boards need to include the above statuses as you defined for each board. The columns can be called whatever you want so that an item with "Ready for Creative" will show up on the "Primary Board"/ "Creative" status AND "Creative" board/ insert column name here.

My original response assumed including QA in development, where you would have Development Board/ Development Review column/ QA -> (Ready for QA -> Dev QA -> Creative QA -> Internal Review -> Client Review -> Ready to deploy)/ Development Board/ Dev Done column.

The short answer is yes you can. Lol.

[Marek Dziedzic]

Awesome - thank you. I was just playing around with the old Board functionality and completely see what you are referring to.

I believe multiple board functionality will be re-introduced in next-gen, but time is still TDB as of writing this.

[Benny Chan]

May I know how to create another Board under the same Project? I tried to fine add board option but no luck? Can help? Thanks a lot. 

[Ryan Fish]

@Benny Chan

You must have admin privileges to create a new board. Boards display the results of a query, so use the same query as the original board when creating the new one.

here are some helpful Atlassian tutorials.

• https://www.atlassian.com/agile/tutorials/creating-your-agile-board
• https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/creating-a-board-764477949.html