display status and priority of Epic

Question

The business partners need some way to easily view both the priority of an Epic (relative to every other Epic), and the status of the epic (i.e. brainstorming, refinement, development, done, etc.).

The Priority field on the cards is not a good way for me to display priority, because Epics aren't priorities as "High", "Medium", "Low"; they're prioritized as "A is more important than B", "B is more important than C", "D is the 4th most important", etc.

The Roadmap page maintains the order of the Epics, so this can be utilized to display priority instead. However, this doesn't display the status of the Epics in a helpful way. And I have no need for that big calendar.

I can create a Board to display the status of each Epic by sorting the Epics into columns. However, all the cards always float to the top of the column; I can't use this page to represent priority.

Therefore, best-case I can use the Roadmap page to represent priority, and the Board to represent status. But this is not intuitive. It kindof defeats the goal of having an easy-to-use display that the business partners can view.

Is there any way to do what I'm trying to do?

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi, and thanks for clarifying.  What you originally described matches your clarification:

The Priority field on the cards is not a good way for me to display priority, because Epics aren't priorities as "High", "Medium", "Low"; they're prioritized as "A is more important than B", "B is more important than C", "D is the 4th most important", etc.

And...

* Rank is the built-in way Jira represents ordering, from 1-to-N for a list of items
* Priority is a rapid, coarse way to order things.  Sometimes teams equate this to "urgency"
* Boards show progress through the mapped status values, and can show the Rank relative to other items in a column (if the board filter includes ORDER BY Rank ASC)

To do what you ask on a Jira board, it would need to leave blank space to show Rank spanning columns.  I do not believe that is possible as it would require an infinite number of definitions for swim lanes based on Rank, and so I suggested a list of the epics, showing their Epic Status.

August Zellmer · Answer

I should've been more clear - "status" being things like Under-Refinement, Development, Ready-for-Release, and Done. I had tried to use the columns of a Board to represent these, but once you put two cards in two different columns, the `ORDER BY Rank` no longer applies because everything floats to the top of the column.

After thinking about this further, I think I can get close to what I'm going for by creating a Board that shows only Epics. The columns are my four(ish) aforementioned statuses. Then I'll create 5 swimlanes - one for each Priority (instead of `ORDER BY Rank`). The downside of this approach is that the Epics aren't really prioritized relative to each other; they're prioritized relative to some arbitrary definition of "High Priority" or "Medium Priority" or whatever. Buuuuut, this is probably close enough to what I was looking for.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do to get closer to what I'm trying to do.

Thanks!

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @August Zellmer -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

What would that view look like to you?

Let's assume it is a list.  Jira uses the Rank field for the 1-to-N prioritization you seem to be describing, so you could use a filter and a dashboard to show just the epics:

project = myProjectName AND issueType = Epic ORDER BY Rank ASC

And...what do you mean by "status": the status of the epic or some interpretation of progress based on the child issues?

Kind regards,
Bill