Best Practice for Using Initiatives & Phases in Jira Premium Plans?

[cvanduyn]

Hi Everyone,

We’re setting up a new program in a mostly greenfield Jira Premium Cloud instance, and we plan to use Plans for our roadmap. Because of this, we’ll be working with the Initiative issue type.

Our program has delivery expectations tied to defined Phases, and we’re trying to determine the cleanest and most scalable structure for representing those phases in Jira.

We’re considering two approaches:

Option 1: Single Initiative + Custom “Phase” Field

Have one Initiative for the entire program, and use a custom field called Phase.

We would then require either the base-level issues or Epics to have this field populated (with a workflow validator enforcing it). This keeps everything under one Initiative but relies heavily on correct field usage.

Option 2: Multiple Initiatives (One per Phase)

Create separate Initiatives such as Phase 1, Phase 2, Phase 3, etc. This makes each phase its own parent container but means we’ll end up with multiple Initiatives for what is essentially one program.

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Has anyone implemented something similar, and which approach worked best for you?

Are there any pros/cons we should be aware of in terms of reporting, plan visibility, or long-term maintainability?

Thanks!