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Help with project structure and issue hierarchies

Admin_z3awox

So I am trying to set up a new Jira project for my team. I want to be able to link Epics to our organization's goals/priorities and then have five different task types underneath Epics. For example, a priority could be "Strengthening Organizational Capacity", an Epic would be "501c3 Transition", with tasks underneath that either being "Internal Task", "Collaborative Task", etc.

I have tried using project management but i need to be able to go higher than epics so I tried doing both the project management and top-level planning but it won't link my Epics to my Initiatives correctly and I get a warning message about "re-parenting".

Any suggestions would be helpful. We are a small team so I wanted to be able to do all of this in one project but I'm not sure if that is feasible.

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Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Admin

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

First off, can you share with us your level of access to the Jira instance? Are you a Jira Product Administrator for the entire instance? Or are you a Jira Project Administrator for specific projects within the Jira instance?

When you say

it won't link my Epics to my Initiatives correctly and I get a warning message about "re-parenting"

...what is the actual action you are taking and the message you receive? Can you provide a screen image of that to give us more context?

When you say you are a "small team" are you speaking of just one team within a larger organization that has multiple teams using Jira?

Lastly, with what types of Jira projects have you been working? You can find the Type of each Jira Project listed in the Type column on the View All Projects page under the Projects menu.

You indicated with your tag posts that you are using a Premium subscription. With a Premium subscription Jira Administrators can customize the issue type hierarchy adding levels above the Epics, such as Initiatives. This is a global customization, so it is important to assess how such changes might impact projects already using existing issue types.

In Jira Cloud there are two types of project customization architectures. These are referred to as Company Managed projects and Team Managed projects.

With Team Managed project the Project Administrator is able to make many customizations including adding new issue types. However, within that Team Managed project it is not possible to add issue type hierarchy levels. Within the project you are limited to the three native levels of Epic > standard issue types > subtasks. To leverage an "Initiative" level above Epics you must create the Initiative issues in a Company Managed project and link your Epics in your Team Managed projects to the Initiatives in the separate Company Managed project.

With a Company Managed project the entire hierarchy can be leveraged in a single project. But the customization of Company Managed projects, such as available issue types, is mostly managed by Jira Product Administrators rather the Project Administrators.

With the Premium subscription you can leverage Jira Plans that can help you visualize the entire hierarchy of your work including the levels above Initiatives, view timelines, and view dependencies.

How does your team operate? Are you leveraging agile methodologies; either Scrum or Kanban, and using the Software Jira Project type Scrum or Kanban boards to help manage your work?

When you provide answers to the questions I've asked I hopefully can provide more targeted suggestions.

Does the information I provided help you focus in on more specific questions?

Lucas Modzelewski _Lumo_

A single project to fit all use cases most likely won't work, or as you scale, it will become a nightmare to manage.

Just imagine a case where one team needs a new status or resolution — it will affect all other teams as well, making things more complicated for them. At some point, people will need extensive training on how to use Jira and which transitions to follow, and as the complexity grows, so will their aversion to it. 😟

Hmm, you might want to look into Jira Product Discovery (JPD). While it's primarily used for product discovery, it can also be leveraged for prioritizing tasks, with some great built-in features: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/product-discovery

Admin_z3awox

hi! thank you for your reply. we are a nonprofit organization with less than 15 full time employees (i.e. people who need jira access). i am the jira product admin for the entire instance.

honestly i don't necessarily need a hierarchy level above epics -- i just want to be able to link epics to our goals/initiatives/priorities. i am using these two projects attached in screenshots. Screenshot 2025-01-13 at 3.47.10 PM.png

we are going to be using an agile approach and dividing our work into 2 week sprints. we aren't developing software but are leveraging the approaches used in developing software to make our work more manageable.

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Admin

Thank you for that additional information.

What you showed in the images you provided are the Project Templates you used. What I need to know is the project Type. Get that information from the View All Projects page under the Projects menu. Example:

Screenshot 2025-01-13 at 2.03.32 PM.png

The "Top-level Planning" template generates a Company Managed Software project.

The "Project Management" template generates a Business project which may be either Team Managed or Company Managed, depending on the choice made by the person who created the project.

Note that Business projects don't directly support the Scrum/sprint methodology with their boards. You either have to use a Software project, or create a separate Scrum board based on a saved filter that includes the issues from your Business project.

If you don't care about issue hierarchy then you can use the generic Issue Linking functionality in Jira to specify a relationship between issue. It is important to note though:

Jira does not recognize any sort of parent/child relationship between issues that are linked using the generic Issue Linking functionality.
It also doesn't really provide anything to help with generating reports across issues based on such linking.
Using issue linking may limit other visualization features, like Timelines.

I'd still like to see some screen images of what you are doing here so that I can help explain what is happening:

I have tried using project management but i need to be able to go higher than epics so I tried doing both the project management and top-level planning but it won't link my Epics to my Initiatives correctly and I get a warning message about "re-parenting".

If you have additional questions, please let us know.

Admin_z3awox

I didn't realize that re: business projects and agile. The generic issue linking doesn't sound like what i need. basically i just want 4 levels with my goals being the highest level or 3 levels but using the goal feature jira has. would appreciate any recommendation that would solve this! Screenshot 2025-01-14 at 12.37.31 PM.png

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