Customize system-wide statuses

Workfront provides a variety of default statues to accommodate your organization’s issue management workflows. These statuses can be renamed to match your organization’s terminology. And statuses can be assigned to specific issue types.

Additional statuses can be created, if needed. Only system administrators can create system-wide statuses. In addition, system administrators control which statuses can be edited by group administrators.

Issues tab on Statues page in Setup

Modify existing statuses

Workfront recommends a minimum number of statuses. This makes choosing the right status easier for users and results in a shorter list of statuses to maintain.

You can edit an existing status to change the name, what issue types it is assigned to, the related color, etc.

Issue status list with Edit option highlighted

  1. Click Setup in the Main Menu.
  2. Expand the Project Preferences section in the left menu panel.
  3. Select Statuses.
  4. Select the Issues tab and make sure System Statuses shows in the upper-right corner.
  5. Select Master List to see the statuses for all issue types. This is where you create or modify an issue status.
  6. Hover over the right side of the status you’d like to rename and click Edit.
  7. Give the status a new name or change any of the other information, as desired.
  8. Lock the status if these settings should apply to all users in your Workfront instance.
  9. Unlock the status to allow group administrators to edit the status only for their groups.
  10. Check the boxes for the issue type the status should apply to.
  11. Click Save.

Window for creating a new status

Status assignments

Not all statuses may be assigned to all issue types. The Statuses page has columns showing which issue type each status can be used for.

Change Order highlighted on Issues tab of Statuses page

To see just the statuses assigned to a specific issue type, just click the issue type name at the top of the window.

Issue tab of Status page with columns highlighted

From here, you can drag and drop the issues into the order you want them to appear in the Status drop-down menu.

To edit the statuses, you’ll need to go back to the Master List.

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