Can you set milestones for an epic?

Question

Our epics are set up as projects and in our process we have a set weekly milestones set out from the beginning to the end of our project, usually set out in a Google doc.

It would be super helpful to have this weekly milestone view added and accessible directly in Jira as part of each epic/parent so our team has a clear path and focus on project goals for each week. I.e. which tickets are part of week 1's milestones and so on. Is there something that could support this need?

Michael Yaroshefsky - Visor for Jira · Answer

Hi @Hamida Bapoo

Welcome to the Atlassian Community. I second Walter's recommendation about checking out the Atlassian marketplace since Jira doesn't give you the ability to add milestones.

One particular app you can try is Visor. It's secure, free, and has two-way syncing, so your Jira data is always up-to-date. You also have the option to add milestones in Visor (including the weekly ones you mentioned above) to present to your team and keep everyone alingned

Find Visor on the Atlassian marketplace here https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1226209/visor-spreadsheet-gantt-chart-for-jira-with-excel-export?hosting=cloud&tab=overview

Let us know if this helps,

Michael

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Hamida Bapoo and welcome to the Community!

There's different ways to approach this. As Jira was built with agile teams in mind, setting milestones as a traditional means of doing project planning is not really there.

But when you step over the classic visualisation of such milestones, there's plenty of ways to address this. It sounds like you are working in some sort of 1-week timeboxes here. You could set up 1-week sprints in a scrum board and add the scheduled tasks to a sprint. Big benefit: the active sprint will only display the work that was foreseen for that week, which creates focus for your team.

You could also use fixversions (releases) as your timeboxes. A release has a start and end date and can be displayed on your timelines in Jira.

I have seen users create milestone issue types for this and link these to other issues. It's not something I would recommend personally as it would be an issue type that does not represent actual work. But it is something I have seen in practice.

And - as an extension to the core product - the Atlassian Marketplace offers a wide collection of GANTT-like apps , allowing you to use more traditional gantt chart features.

Hope this helps!