Hello everyone, I'm trying to change our existing hierarchy. I want to create a category above epic

Question

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to change our existing hierarchy. I want to create a category above epic and another category between story and subtask. I know there is an option through the Advanced Roadmaps, and indeed I was able to add Initiative over Epic, but I am unable to produce a story below the story and then subtask. Like this - Initiative => epic => business story => technical story => sub task.

The option to change the story is blocked for me. Is there a way to create such a hierarchy?

Guilhem Dupuy · Accepted Answer

Hi @Tal Ben Avram

Unfortunately, there are only 3 possible hierarchy levels in Jira : Epic, Tasks/Stories and all other issue types, and subatsks.

To my knowledge, you can't add more into your projects.

You can only visualize other hierarchy levels through addons like BigPicture or Structure, but they won't have an impact on your Jira projects.

Dave Rosenlund (Trundl) · Accepted Answer

Hello, and welcome, @Tal Ben Avram.  As @Guilhem Dupuy says, Jira only supports the three-level hierarchy of Epic > Story (or Bug or Task etc.) > Sub-task.  And, as you point out, Advanced Roadmaps allows you add a new level above the Epic, but not split the Story the way that you'd like to.

The first question you (your org.) ought to be asking yourself is, can we adapt to the way Jira expects you to do things, or do we have compelling reasons to add something to Jira in order to use our custom hierarchy?

If the answer is the latter, as Guilhem says BigPicture and Structure are the two most popular Atlassian Marketplace apps for doing this.

This community article is about a company that wanted to use their preferred hierarchies — that differ from team to team — and how they manage their projects at the portfolio level. I hope it helps.   They were on the server edition of Jira when they started, but they are on Atlassian Cloud now and still using the same approach.

Best,

-dave

Jimi Wikman_ex43zi · Accepted Answer

What you are trying to do is to expand into the business processes, which is what Advanced Roadmaps is pretty much for. You confuse Epic with an actual process, however, probably because whatever ritual you are using have Epic at the strategic level.

This is common because the term Epic just mean container of large things and you will find it on all levels.

I suggest you simple rename your structure a bit and you should get what you need:

* Initiative (project)
* Business Need (high level requirement and estimate)
* Feature / Epic (current Epic)
* Story (work task)
* Subtask

This is usually easier if you look at your process and create issue types for each level. Business need->Requirement->Work order only works if it is in a financed flow, like a line organization. For Project based, you typically require going up a bit further.

I often set up a business setup and a development setup so you can use Epic on both levels. This way you can have the business processes in one Jira and the development processes in one or more Jira projects. Then you have Confluence in between as the Requirement documentation tool.