2 answers
hi! thank you for your reply. we are a nonprofit organization with less than 15 full time employees (i.e. people who need jira access). i am the jira product admin for the entire instance.
honestly i don't necessarily need a hierarchy level above epics -- i just want to be able to link epics to our goals/initiatives/priorities. i am using these two projects attached in screenshots.
we are going to be using an agile approach and dividing our work into 2 week sprints. we aren't developing software but are leveraging the approaches used in developing software to make our work more manageable.
Hello @Admin
Thank you for that additional information.
What you showed in the images you provided are the Project Templates you used. What I need to know is the project Type. Get that information from the View All Projects page under the Projects menu. Example:
The "Top-level Planning" template generates a Company Managed Software project.
The "Project Management" template generates a Business project which may be either Team Managed or Company Managed, depending on the choice made by the person who created the project.
- Note that Business projects don't directly support the Scrum/sprint methodology with their boards. You either have to use a Software project, or create a separate Scrum board based on a saved filter that includes the issues from your Business project.
If you don't care about issue hierarchy then you can use the generic Issue Linking functionality in Jira to specify a relationship between issue. It is important to note though:
- Jira does not recognize any sort of parent/child relationship between issues that are linked using the generic Issue Linking functionality.
- It also doesn't really provide anything to help with generating reports across issues based on such linking.
- Using issue linking may limit other visualization features, like Timelines.
I'd still like to see some screen images of what you are doing here so that I can help explain what is happening:
I have tried using project management but i need to be able to go higher than epics so I tried doing both the project management and top-level planning but it won't link my Epics to my Initiatives correctly and I get a warning message about "re-parenting".
If you have additional questions, please let us know.
I didn't realize that re: business projects and agile. The generic issue linking doesn't sound like what i need. basically i just want 4 levels with my goals being the highest level or 3 levels but using the goal feature jira has. would appreciate any recommendation that would solve this!
I'm really a novice when it comes to the Atlas Goals feature. If you want to get help on that topic specifically you may be better off starting a new Question.
Through experimentation I found that Goals field needs to be added to the Screen used by your issue type in your project in order for you to associate the issue to a goal and see the goals associated with an issue. You can do that through Project Settings > Issues > Layouts. I tried it only with Software projects, both Company Managed and Team Managed. This is how it appears in issues.
I did not find a Link Goals button as shown in screen images in this post:
Using Atlas Goals doesn't really introduce another hierarchy level within Jira itself, as far as I can tell. Atlas Goals are not Jira issues, they are just related information. And a given issue can be related to multiple Atlas Goals. I'm not familiar with reporting options related to Atlas Goals.
If you want a true hierarchy contained within Jira you would have to
- create a custom issue type for your "goals",
- then modify the Issue Type Hierarchy to add a level above Epics and add your new "goals" issue type to that level.
Then you could use that to establish a hierarchy of Epics (and implicitly all their children) being under a given goal. Note that in that hierarchy structure an Epic could be a child of only one goal, in the same way that a Story or Task is a child of only one Epic. If Epics need to be able to relate to more than one "goal", then we're back to using Atlas Goals or generic issue linking.
With the modified hierarchy you could then leverage the functionality available in Jira related to issue type hierarchy for visualization, like the Plans Timeline feature.
Note that the hierarchical relationships above Epics can't be visualized in boards; not the board in a Business project nor the Scrum or Kanban boards available with Software projects. The hierarchy visualization is available only in the Advanced Plans features. In individual issues you can see the issue's direct children listed, and in its breadcrumbs you can see its parent issue. But in the boards you cannot visualize the extended hierarchy.
In one of your earlier responses you said:
honestly i don't necessarily need a hierarchy level above epics -- i just want to be able to link epics to our goals/initiatives/priorities.
But it really isn't that simple, is it? You'll want to be able to do some sort of reporting based on that linkage, right? The type of reporting you want to do and the information you need to gather will influence the decision about an implementation that will satisfy your needs.
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