Ranking within the hierarchy levels

[Deleted user]

My Requirements Hierarchy (from highest to lowest) is (1) Initiative, (2) Epic, (3) Story.

In Portfolio, how does the ranking change based on the level of the hierarchy you are in? That is, if my highest level in the hierarchy is initiative and the initiatives are ranked in priority order, then if I view the next level down - i.e., epics, should I not see the epics in priority order based on the order of its parent initiative?

I want to ensure the epics I work on is based on the priority of the parent initiative.

[Roi Fine]

Hi @[deleted],

If a issue has children (e.g. initiative with some epics) then the rank of the parent becomes the rank of its highest-ranked child. The reason for that is that we want to make the parent rank represent what will be done first, if the top story of an epic is ranked last this epic will be scheduled last so it should appear last in the ranking.

Re-ranking a parent issue will re-rank both the parent itself and all of its children.

I.e: Ranking an initiative at the top will cause all of it's epics to get ranked at the top among other epics as well.

Let me know how I can assist further,

Cheers,

[DarkSideMilk]

What if that doesn't seem to be happening?

i.e. I order my portfolio plan by initiatives and save the changes.

I go to the kanban backlog to see them in that order and the tasks/stories are in the right order but that initiatives are in random places.

It sounds like the initiative should be showing above all its children in the kanban backlog which is what I want, but it's not what I'm seeing.

Any thoughts?

[DarkSideMilk]

Could it be related to not all the initiatives that exist in the board/issue source are in the portfolio plan? In which case, how do we overcome this?

[archan2000]

@Roi Fine : I'm not seeing Roadmap is working like that.  Changing Initiative Rank doesn't impact the Epics that belong to that Initiative when the I change the Hierarchy to "Epic to Story".

Please advise. 

[Garth Hume]

Hi, this does not work as described.  We need a way to align our priority through our hierarchy.  

[mike]

Any further updates to this? I see this page... which clearly states different behavior to what @Roi Fine describes

https://confluence.atlassian.com/advancedroadmapsserver0329/ranking-issues-1021219012.html#Rankingissues-independent

One *expects* the behavior Roi defines - changing an epic's (or an initiative's) rank *should* change it's children - someone has said the parent work is more important, so the ranking/ordering should flow down.  The BS "This is helpful especially if your teams have already ranked the issues in their Jira Software boards" is totally at odds with project management.

[Ivan Ribakov]

> The BS "This is helpful especially if your teams have already ranked the issues in their Jira Software boards" is totally at odds with project management.

I don't fully agree with this particular statement, since there may be genuine reasons to re-rank children by breaking the parent ranking (think of a team with more than 1 person - some epics may be worked on in parallel and their child items will have to interleave in the absolute rank).

But I do agree that as an initial rank for the Roadmap/Backlog, ranking all child items based on their parents is a good starting place. This could be achieved by adding a button to rank all children based on their parents one time which will then allow a more fine-grained prioritisation of the child items.