adding support for initiatives on jira server

[Tim Black]

Atlassian's documentation for Jira Server product here links to this page about Agile PM and how to use Initiatives, but Jira Server does NOT support Initiatives out of the box. (False advertising at worst, and at best a thinly-veiled plug for Portfolio which does support Initiatives.)

If anyone has successfully configured their JIRA Server instance to support "Initiative" as a just-above-Epic Issue Type and fully integrated this into the myriad "schemes" JIRA server requires to properly implement such a thing:

1. Issue Type Scheme
2. Field  Configuration Scheme
3. Screen Scheme
4. Issue Type Screen Scheme
5. Workflow Scheme

.. so that a Jira project may practically use Initiatives, then please let me know. I have done 1. above but the remainder of the work require is daunting, especially after reading in the Jira Server support links above and being lead to believe that this was a native feature.

Disclaimer: yes, I know Jira Portfolio supports Initiatives, and switching to Portfolio is not an option.

UPDATE:

I have chosen to use JIRA Server to organize a large body of work related to "Software Engineering Operations" at my company. This includes things like improving and managing software design, development, build, test, and release processes, as well as developer/SQA training and establishing best practices for information sharing. Originally, I was hoping to use "Initiative" to categorize these high level initiatives. 

After realizing how much work is involved in making this work in JIRA Server, I had tenatively decided to use Epics for these long-lived "areas" of work. But then today, I came across Components in our Server, which lead me down a long line of research that ended at Piotr Trojanowski's essay comparing the usage of Components vs that of Stories and Epics. Piotr's experienced, suggested usage of Components seems to map perfectly to the kinds of high-level concepts that I need associative containers for, things that transcend teams, products, and time: e.g. "Build and Release Automation", "Test Automation", "Knowledge Sharing"..

I plan to consider using Components in this way, but am still interested in learning about others that might be using Initiatives in JIRA Server.

Thanks for your consideration.

Tim

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

I've done initiatives with Portfolio, Structure and ScriptRunner (making a plain issue behave much like one).  Plain Jira (Software) simply doesn't do them, you will need an App to add functionality to support them.