Working as a consultant on JIRA and JIRA workflow, I have done some observations that I would like to share - hopefully brining some success into Your project and implementation.

Face the music (real life)

No workflow can be made on a piece of paper and be expected to work

No workflow can be made in JIRA (possibly from a piece of paper and be expected to work)

The only way to sucess in to get the hands dirty, sit down with the participants or "stockholders" - people with involvement and the daily participation in the processes.

Train, test, change/ implement and repeat (A analoge to the The Cookbook principle for Changes and SOPs

KISS - Divide and Conquer

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Keep Your workflows relative simple, and break them into sub-workflow handled by subtasks or links sub-issues or linked issues if possible. This has several advantages:

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B. Specialities, as different Workflow for same issuetype in 2 projects are easier to maintain, as over issue types can still share the same workflows.

C. Parallel processing can be done on sub- or linked tasks by several other Assignee's - whereas one large workflow is serial with one Assignee at the time.

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