How many levels of hierarchy are manageable for Portfolio above the JIRA Epic Level

Scott Barone

We are new to the Portfolio add-on for JIRA.  Above the EPIC Level for Portfolio we are looking to have 3 levels One would be like a longer term Roadmap level, then a Program level of sorts and then the Initiative that would represent the actual project.  Are folks using this type of hierarchy and if so is it working for you? What are the pro's and con's?

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Scott Barone,

Seems your question is a couple of weeks old already. I am quite sure there's no technical blockers for you to set up the hierarchy you describe.

To be honest, I have not ran into a real life situation yet where this has been implemented as such. The most important risk I see, is that you can only determine a single hierarchy for Portfolio, so it should be applicable to all your plans. There is no way to skip levels in the hierarchy, so you should be able to link all your work to a roadmap item - at least if that's what you are after.

In Portfolio 2.x, you could use themes (see documentation) to represent the roadmap and - given you are on server) the actual Program feature (see documentation) to do something similar. The documentation does mention some caveats when using programs as well.