Jira Epics are global vs project specific

[Jason Harwood]

Hi there,

I work in an enterprise software company, where we have many development teams which all working in aligned sprints and releases. 

Each of these teams - approx 30 of them, all have epics to account for a variety of BAU tasks, such as Bug Fixes and Testing, Internal Support & Customer Support. 

Recently our company migrated from Jira Server to Jira Cloud. In Jira Server Epics were scoped to the project which was ideal. This made sense in that our team would scope work to be delivered for the project they were working on, to an epic that we then owned.

However, in Jira Cloud it appears that Epics are global across all projects within our Jira instance. 

The problem that this raises for us on a daily basis is that when anyone goes to apply the epic to a given issue via the Parent dropdown, the user is now presented with ALL of the epics from all 30 development teams. Meaning that when I type search for "Bug Fixes & Testing" that this presents me with a list of 30 epics to sort through to assign the correct one as, each team has their own epic to track this BAU work across a given release.

This is incredibly error prone and we are discovering many tickets are getting assigned to the incorrect epic across all teams, which creates inaccurate reporting and rework by our team leads/Jira peeps to maintain the hygiene of our Jira tickets. 

While I recognise that this feature would work well for some companies it does not work well for mine. 

I would like to request that we are able to have an option to toggle epics being scoped globally or by project. Even better, if at the project level you could determine any other projects epics that you would like to be visible to your project for the times where we have cross team projects in play. But this case is the exception rather than the rule.

Thank you for taking this feedback into consideration.

Jason Harwood

Agile Delivery Manager

[Maria Rusnakova]

Hi @Jason Harwood,

do all your teams have access to all your projects? Parent issue can be created under different project than the child issue, so if you need to link them, Epics from the another project have to be listed in the Parent field.

In your case, could you adjust access to projects so that the teams see only the projects to which they need access? If your permission scheme is set to allow all users browse the project, you could restrict this permission or if all your teams have a project role assigned to them, you could remove those teams that don't need access.

This would reduce the number of Epics that are available in the Parent field, but your colleagues still have to know which Epic they need to assign to the child.