Manage how work flows in your team-managed service space

Workflows represent your service team’s process. They control how agents progress your service requests and guide them on how to resolve a work item from start to finish.

What is a workflow?

Two concepts define a workflow in a team-managed service space:

1. Statuses – the steps in your service team’s working process that describe the state of a request.

2. Transitions – how a request can move between statuses.

Workflow statuses

Statuses help people understand the state of a piece of work. They appear in many views across your Jira site, and Atlassian or third-party apps.

In Jira Service Management, each space template comes with default statuses. These are some of the statuses your space might come with:

• Open

• Reopened

• Pending

• Work in progress

• Waiting for customer

• Waiting for support

• Escalated

• Done

• Canceled

As your service space matures, you may need to add more statuses to control the flow of your team’s work.

Statuses can be shared between request types. This allows you to search for and report on customer requests in the same status across any request type. For example, you can find any requests that are currently “Waiting for customer” regardless if customers are requesting IT help or they submitted a purchase request.

What are status categories?

Jira Service Management lets you collect many statuses under a to-do, in-progress, or done category. These categories help you sort, filter, and report on your work. For example, you might have a “Open” to-do status and a “Reopened” to-do status. Or, you might have a “Waiting for customer” in-progress status and a “Waiting for support” in-progress status.

Read more about creating, editing, and deleting statuses in the workflow editor

What are workflow transitions?

Transitions connect statuses and help define the flow of work in your space.

These pathways define how people move pieces of work through your workflow. For example, if you run a pizza shop, you might have different statuses depending on who’s picking up the pizza. Once the pizza is “Ready for pickup”, it can move down the “Send for delivery” transition, putting it in the “On the way” status. Or, it can transition down the “Give to customer” transition, showing that the pizza work is done.

Read more about creating, editing, and deleting transitions in the workflow editor

View and edit a work type’s workflow

To view a work type’s workflow:

1. From your sidebar, select Space settings, then Work types.

2. From the sidebar, select the work type you want to know more about.

3. Select Edit workflow.

View and edit a request type's workflow

To view a request type’s workflow:

1. From your sidebar, select Service space settings, then Request types.

2. From the sidebar, select the request type you want to know more about.

3. Select Edit workflow.

Save changes to a work type’s workflow

To save a work type’s workflow:

1. When you’re done editing the work type’s workflow, select Update workflow.

2. From the dropdown, deselect lozenges to confirm which work type the workflow will apply to.

3. Select Save.

Save changes to a request type’s workflow

When you’re done making edits to the request type’s workflow, select Save and close from the toolbar.

Resolve conflicts when saving a workflow

Workflow changes might affect work that’s already in flight. Don’t worry too much about conflicts. Jira warns you about any work items that are in statuses you’re deleting and asks you to change their status to a valid one. Keep in mind, prompted changes like these won’t execute any rules. It just updates the work items' statuses.

Resolve conflicts when saving a workflow

Workflow changes might affect customer requests that are already in flight. Don’t worry too much about conflicts. Jira Service Management warns you about any requests that are in statuses you’re deleting and asks you to change their status to a valid one. Keep in mind, prompted changes like these won’t execute any rules. It just updates the requests' statuses.

Copy a request type’s workflow to other request types

Although different request types collect different information from your customers, your agents may work on resolving them in the same way. To save time, you can copy a request type’s workflow to other request types in your service space.

To copy a request type’s workflow to other request types:

1. From your sidebar, select Service space settings, then Request types.

2. From the sidebar, select the request type with the workflow you want to copy.

3. Select Edit workflow.

4. Select More actions (), then Copy to other request types.

When you copy to other request types, we save your current workflow, so we can apply it to the other workflows in your service space. We’ll warn you about any requests that are in statuses you’re deleting and ask you to change their status to a valid one. Prompted changes like these won’t execute any rules. We just update the requests' statuses.