Jira Portfolio:Can you delete/remove a parent link from an Initiative?

Question

I have a scenario whereby an initiative has been linked to another initiative. I want to remove the parent link so that they are stand alone initiatives.

Does anyone know if there is away to do this?

Background:

We have a structure of Initiative >Epic > Story and are using Portfolio so have the Parent Link field enabled.

Therefore when we assign a link we are using the Parent Link field to associate all the epics under an initiative and use the Epic Link to associate the stories to the epic.

What someone has managed to do is use the Parent Link to associate and Initiative to an Initiative and we are now unable to remove this link. They should not be associated with each other as they are standalone.

Richard Cross · Answer

I have discovered a quicker fix:

In Manage Apps > Advanced Roadmaps > Hierarchy configuration, add a new entry above "Initiative" and save.  You do not even need to select an issue type.

In the affected Initiatives, you should now be able to edit (and blank) the Parent Link field.

Richard Cross · Answer

If "Initiative" is at the top of your hierarchy, then the solutions you presented unfortunately do not work.

In the Issue View screen, the field is not click-editable, but shows a warning triangle.

In the Issue Edit and Bulk Edit screens, you see the following:

and it's similarly not editable.

The only solution is to bulk change the affected Initiative(s) back to a lower type (e.g. Epic), remove the parent link, then convert them back.

However, if they now already have Epics linked to them, I'm not sure what would happen.

Jordan_Janis · Answer

Hi Joanne,

A couple of options here.

Add Parent Link to Initiative screen:

* By adding the Parent Link field to Initiative you will be able to see/edit it on the Initiative Screen. 
* Then just click on the Parent Link, press Delete, and the click the "checkmark" and save the issue.
* Then remove Parent Link from the Initiative screen.

Use Bulk Change (better if you have more than one to fix):

* Use issue search so that the Init you want to change is in the results. Then choose Tools -> Bulk Change.
* In the Bulk Change wizard choose Edit and then select the Parent Link field but leave the value next to Parent Link blank.
* Finish bulk change.

By the way, this happens when someone clones a child of an Initiative (in your case an Epic that has a parent Init), or creates a new one and sets the Parent Link, and then, through one means or another, converts that Epic to an Initiative.  Even though a Parent Link on Initiative is "illegal" Jira still retains the value in the Parent Link field.

This is difficult to fully prevent. You can remove issue type from the edit screens but there are two other ways in which a user can change the type of an issue.  Bulk Change and when Moving the issue from one project to another.  Pretty frustrating!

If you haven't already you'll notice this causing problems with certain issue searches.  If you have an issue search, for example, that looks for EMPTY parent links, the issues with "ghost" links will NOT be returned.  Moreover, you would expect that if you did a search for these issues and added Parent Link to the columns that you would see the value in Parent Link, but you don't.  So on the one hand Jira is showing you the field is empty, but on the other hand it's treating it as a non-Empty field!

There is a suggestion regarding this problem... maybe you can go and vote for it! Thanks!

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2059