How many columns does your JIRA workflow have?

JIRA, Trello, Asana, Monday.com... there is no dearth of tools at our disposal for project management. Before we dive in, let me state that this post is not about tools comparison or which tools is best for your given purpose. This post is about what "workflow" we build around such a tool and how it can make a team efficient or handicap. I'll use JIRA as an example, but the pitfall can apply to any tool we use.

These tools give you some default to get you started. For example, here is one from JIRA.

Let's say we begin with this simple flow. A few days later, following happens.

• A developer picks up a story. The story is not detailed enough. It needs to be groomed. Let's add GROOMING state.
• When GROOMING finishes, we don't have time to pick it up for implementation yet. Let's put it in "NOT STARTED" state.
• Developer picks it up for implementation "IN PROGRESS". But, he needs more information or is blocked. Yep, yep, let's add "NEED INFO" and "BLOCKED" state.
• And, here is my favorite, when a ticket finishes "IN QA", does it not move to DONE. No it doesn't. Because, it's not deployed to Production yet. It goes to "QA ACCEPTED".

I know what you are thinking. Some of these borderline silly. But, take a look at your own workflow. I bet it has some customization. I am not against customization. I don't even have a recommended list of columns. As answer to most process questions, it depends.

Here is a few guidelines I use in determining what columns I need for my team.

• How many primary roles people are playing on my team. Do we have a dedicated Business Analyst, Product Manager, QA on our team (yes QA can be optional!).
• Such a workflow is for managing the bottleneck. On most software development team, the bottleneck is the hard-core developer/implementer resources. You manage the bottleneck and not others. What this means is you don't need initial analysis, grooming etc columns on your primary board (there can be separate board for Product/BA team if they so choose). I wouldn't even have more than a single QA centric columns. I would club "NEED INFO", "BLOCKED" into "TO DO" which essentially means it's not currently being worked on.

We, at APFusion, think of board as a tool to "hand-off" story from one person to another. If a single person is leading "grooming" before "implementing" (yes, developers are encouraged to groom), we don't need 2 side-by-side columns for this. Below is what our workflow currently looks like.

Is this workflow giving us everything we need. No. But again, our goal is to manage developer bandwidth bottleneck. Rest will take care of itself. Will this workflow change? It could, as our team dynamic changes. All I can say is we will try hard not to add another column just because. Every columns will have a process cost. And, we will think hard before adding that cost.

How many columns does your workflow have!