Ticket statuses and workflows

Statuses are how a ticket tells you where it stands at a glance. A good set of statuses is short, honest and matches how your team actually works. A bad set is a sprawling flowchart nobody follows.

Here is how to think about statuses and the workflow they create.

Start with the essentials

Almost every team needs three ideas: not started, being worked on, and finished. Pending, In progress and Done cover that. If you stopped here, you would already have a working system.

From there, add only the statuses that earn their place. To be confirmed, Waiting on feedback, Cancelled and Will not do are common additions that capture real states work gets stuck in.

Mark what "done" means

Some statuses mean a ticket is finished: Done, Cancelled, Will not do. Flagging those as completed states unlocks useful automation, like auto-archiving tickets that have sat in a finished state for a while, so your board stays clean without manual tidying.

Order and rename freely

Your workflow is just the order of your statuses, left to right. Being able to rename, reorder and add statuses, per project, means the tool bends to your process instead of the other way around. Renaming should never move tickets around, only the label changes.