Business wants Epic added to JSM

[Darryl St_ Pierre]

One of our business units has a very complex process that occurs after intake. Multiple staff and other business units are involved in the overall activity. My usual recommendation is to use tasks and subtasks, and cloned or new issues created for the external processes. This is proving to be insufficient as it does not allow a single status tracking view for the requester.

The business owner has requested that we add the Epic issue type to the project (which is still being spec'd/built). I have concerns that this will create a level of complexity that will be difficult to manage, and will not fully work as intended.

Does anyone have any advice, recommendations, or a similar working scenario in their environment?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Darryl St_ Pierre 

Can you provide more information about the problem you are trying to solve? I think it is this, but we need more details about the requirements:

it does not allow a single status tracking view for the requester.

When you say "requester" are you talking about a JSM Customer? Do you want JSM customer requests to be equivalent to Epics?

If so, and child issues were created for the Epics, what reporting/visibility would you require the customer to have into these child issues?

What information are you trying to make available to the requester when you say "single status tracking view"?

[Darryl St_ Pierre]

Great questions @Trudy Claspill , and I realized I left an element out of this - use of the Team field. Business owner wants to be able to assign different teams to different child issues, which is fine until you get to subtasks which inherit the parent team and cannot be modified.

Yes, Requester = JSM customer, and I guess the intent is to make the initial submission an Epic.

Since all the Customer knows would be their submission, I believe the desire is to show a consolidated view of the status of each of the child issues. I'm under the impression, perhaps incorrectly, that linking alone will not accomplish this for the Customer.

[Trudy Claspill]

The customer portal doesn't provide a method to show child issues or linked issues when viewing a Request. If the requester views the Request/Epic they submitted, there will not be any information about the related issues.

The customer could view the related issues separately, if those related issues have a Request Type assigned to them and the requester is either the Reporter or the request has been Shared with them.

You could add a custom number field to the issue type, and add that custom number field to the request form for the Request Type associated to the Epic issue type. You could use an Automation Rule to update the custom number field periodically to show a "percent complete" value. The requester would be able to see that information through the customer portal.

JSM is not my area of expertise, but I'm fairly certain that native capabilities don't exist for providing any sort of reporting to the customers besides their ability to see individual requests through the customer portal. You could potentially use Automation Rules to collect the Epic/Child information and send the requester and email directly through the Automation Rule. I'm sure there are also third party apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace that could help with providing reports to requesters.