Hierachy level between Epic and standard issue types

[Timo Greimel]

I have the following work type scheme: Initiative - Epic - StandardTypes (Feature/Story/Task) - Subtask

I want to get a new work type between Epic and Standard, but in the hierachy settings I can only put work types above epic.

Is there a way to change that without an app?

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Timo Greimel , welcome to the Atlassian Community and thanks for your post.

Please can I ask why you want to put another level between Epic and standard types?

In general, while you can have a custom hierarchy, you cannot, as you have seen, really fundamentally change the order of things. For example, you can't have anything lower than a sub-task either. https://support.atlassian.com/jira-cloud-administration/docs/configure-the-issue-type-hierarchy/ 

You can have more levels above the Epic but after a while, I find it is not useful to have more than 4 levels of hierarchy as they start to lose meaning.

Please can you share a bit your thinking behind what you want to achieve / are trying to do?

Best wishes

[Timo Greimel]

Hi Valerie,

I have a request that the hierachy levels should be:

Initiative - Epic - Story - Task - Subtask

    (3)      -   (2)  -   (1)   -  (0)   -  (-1) 

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Timo Greimel , thanks for your comment.

I understood what you said you wanted to do. I don't understand the why.

As the documentation explains, you can add more levels of hierarchy but you cannot go under the sub-task and you also can't modify the standard configuration. So, you cannot add a level of hierarchy between the Epic and Standard Level. Why do you want to do this please?

Thanks

[Timo Greimel]

Hi Valerie,

as explained, the usecase for some colleagues is to have only one work type per hierachy level. I don´t need a level below subtask, just Story and task on two levels between epic and subtask

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Timo Greimel , thanks for your comment. You cannot split the hierarchy like this. You can really only create more levels above the Epic.

Cheers

[Olga Cheban _TitanApps_]

Hi, @Timo Greimel !
As Valerie already noted, unfortunately, changing the basic hierarchy like that is not possible. So the only way to address this is to find a workaround that would help you accomplish what you are looking for.

A workaround I can suggest is adding checklists inside subtasks - in this case, checklist items will be at the -2 level of hierarchy, and subtasks will serve you instead of tasks.

As a result, the hierarchy will look like this:

Initiative (2) -> Epic (1) -> Story (0) -> Subtask (-1) -> Checklist item (-2)

Our solution, Smart Checklist for Jira, allows you to use checklists as a substitute for subtasks. You can tag responsible people, add deadlines, and set custom workflow statuses for each checklist item. All this (and more) gives you most of the functionality you would get with subtasks, plus some new useful features, such as reusable checklist templates.

Here's an example of how it may look:

Please let me know if you have any questions!

[Ivan Manolov - JXL]

Hey @Timo Greimel,

Welcome to the community.

As mentioned by @Valerie Knapp, what you are looking for is not possible out of the box.

For an improved visual experience, and if you’re open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you may want to have a look at the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your Jira data that allows viewing, inline-editing, copy-pasting, sorting, and filtering by all your work items' fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel, Google Sheets, Smartsheet, or Airtable. It also comes with a number of powerful features, including highly customisable issue hierarchies. These issue hierarchies can be based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships (like task/sub-task, or epic/story), based on issue links of configurable issue link types or any combination of these.

In this example, you can see that a "task" is shown as a parent of bugs and stories, even though they are all "base issue types" in Jira - and that's because there's a certain issue link between them.  

I should also add that JXL can do much more than the above: From sum-ups and grouping, to conditional formatting, or inline bulk editing via copy/paste.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Ivan