How to transition parent task with sub-tasks for some status changes without Paid plugins

[Andrew Martin]

I manage a team of resources across four different areas. The team works in a Kanban way. I have a Kanban project for each of the four areas. I then combine each project's issues in a board. Each area drags and drops their "Backlog" status requirements as per priority within their swimlane on the board.

I then have an additional swimlane set up to look for a status called "Next Up". Each week, I sit with the business and we choose the cross-project priorities for the team. Once decided, we move any of the "Backlog" status items to "Next Up". This removes them from the project-specific priority list and into a cross-project view of all issues. We can then drag and drop these issues to rank them, and the team picks up work in order of this ranking.

In short, it looks like this:

Backlog     Next Up     In Progress    Done

Next Up:
                  Issue 1
                  Issue 5

Project 1:
Issue 4
Issue 2

Project 2
Issue 3
Issue 6

It's a bit hacky, but it works well enough for what we're trying to do. Once the team move things to In Progress and beyond, the "rank" is lost, but it's now irrelevant as the work in in progress.

Finally, I have a Dashboard set up which shows all in progress work, all cross-project prioritised work, and all single project prioritised work. Again, this all works well enough.

Where my issues arise is when I'm dealing with sub-tasks. Because Jira treats sub-tasks totally independently to parent tasks, I have the situation where someone on the Kanban board can advance a sub-task to "In Progress", but the parent task is untouched. This means when my customers look at the Dashboard, they see the parent story on the "Backlog" or "Next Up", when the subtasks are in progress. This is a bit confusing.

Ask:

Can I set something up so that:

 - Any time a sub-task is moved from Backlog to Next Up, the parent task and all other sub-tasks are moved with it?

 - Any time a sub-task is moved from Next Up to In Progress, the parent task and all other sub-tasks are moved with it?

 - Any time ALL sub-tasks belonging to a parent are moved to Done, the parent task is moved to Done.

Additionally, as my company has no finances available for paid plugins, I'd need to do all this out of the box or using free plugins.

Does anybody have any suggestions (or improvements on my process that would render this irrelevant)?