Issue Type Child of Parent, Grand-Parent, or GGParent

[John S.]

The hierarchy in Jira is pretty linear where you have Theme - Initiative - Epic - Story.  The problem is that epics are not always needed, as they are just large stories.  So, when I don't need an epic, how can you set the Story  parent link as the Initiative?  I see no way to do this now or in the future with Jira.

Likewise, we use the premium edition and have Initiative - Feature - Epic - Story.  In such hierarchy, some Epics or Stories are not part of a feature, per se, and can go straight to the Initiative (great-grand-parent).

 RE: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/upcoming-changes-epic-link-replaced-with-parent/

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

As a workaround you could create dummy Initiative, called something like "No initiative" and add those epics that require no initiative to this. It could be look at as a "blank value".

[Mark Segall]

Hi @John Sacks - Unfortunately, the Jira hierarchy is very rigid.  It is designed for top-down story decomposition where everything starts with a goal in mind then is broken down.  It requires a mind shift where You begin with the initiative and the assumption is that every initiative should break down to a feature which breaks down to an Epic and so on.

There are marketplace apps such as Structure that can provide more flexibility than Advanced Roadmaps if it turns out that you cannot shift to that method of story decomposition.