It is often said that a good software system is one that adapts to your business and not one that requires your business to adapt to the software. Jira is an excellent example of the former. The power of Jira is that you can easily configure it to model your existing business processes through the use of workflows.

A business process flow can often be represented as a flow chart. For example, a typical document approval flow may include tasks such as document preparation, document review, and document submission, where the user needs to follow these tasks in sequential order. You can easily implement this as a Jira workflow. Each task will be represented as a workflow status with transitions guiding you on how you can move from one status to the next. In fact, when working with workflows, it is often a good approach to first draft out the logical flow of the process as a flow chart and then implement this as a workflow. As we will see, Jira provides many tools to help you visualize your workflows.

Now that we have briefly seen how you can map a normal business process to a Jira workflow, it is time to take a closer look at the components of a workflow, and how you can create your own workflows.