What are Jira workflows?

All Jira projects contain issues that your team can view, work on, and transition through stages of work — from creation to completion. The path that your issues take is called a workflow. Each Jira workflow is composed of a set of statuses and transitions that your issue moves through during its lifecycle, and typically represents work processes within your organization. 

Company-managed project workflows

In addition, Jira uses workflow schemes to define the relationship between issue types and workflows. Workflow schemes are associated with a project, and make it possible to use a different workflow for different combinations of project and issue types. If you need to edit or create a more advanced workflow to match how your team or organization works, you can log in as a Jira administrator with global permission to access and create your workflow. To keep things simple, use the default workflows that come with the project type you select in Jira. You can always modify or create new workflows later.

Team-managed project workflows

Project admins can create, edit, or delete project workflows in team-managed projects. You can start off by using the default workflows that come with the template that you selected when you created a project. You can always modify or create new workflows later. You can have multiple workflows in each project through assigning issue types' their own workflow.