What are Jira workflows?

All Jira projects contain issues that your team can view, edit, and complete in work phases from creation to completion. The path your issues take is called a workflow. Workflows represent the processes within an organization through a set of statuses and transitions. Status refers to the current stage of an issue, such as Opened, In Progress, Resolved, Reopened, and so on. When an issue moves from one status to another, it is referred to as a transition. Workflows are used in Jira to meet various business goals, from handling customer/client service tickets to onboarding a new employee.

Workflows are one of the most powerful features of Jira, as they keep everyone aligned and ensure that deadlines are never missed.

Jira has built-in workflows that you can use without modification or create your own from scratch. You cannot edit built-in workflows, but you can copy them and use that copy as the basis for creating your own workflows.

Another option is to import workflows from Atlassian Marketplace.

But it is important that to access and manage workflows, you must be logged in as a user with Jira admin permissions. Users with project administrator rights are only allowed to edit projects that are not shared with other projects. They have limited editing permissions and can’t create new workflows.

This is what an exemplary workflow looks like: