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Business wants Epic added to JSM

Darryl St_ Pierre

One of our business units has a very complex process that occurs after intake. Multiple staff and other business units are involved in the overall activity. My usual recommendation is to use tasks and subtasks, and cloned or new issues created for the external processes. This is proving to be insufficient as it does not allow a single status tracking view for the requester.

The business owner has requested that we add the Epic issue type to the project (which is still being spec'd/built). I have concerns that this will create a level of complexity that will be difficult to manage, and will not fully work as intended.

Does anyone have any advice, recommendations, or a similar working scenario in their environment?

Accepted answers

Darryl St_ Pierre

Without a definitive answer to the original question, I went ahead and added the Epic field to one of my projects as a test. With very minimal testing I determined that it does function, and it allows multiple different types of requests to be added as Child issues.

I turned it over to the business owner with "no guarantees, explicit or implied" about whether it will work 100% correctly. Haven't received any feedback yet but will provide updates when I do.

All comments

Trudy P Claspill

Hello @Darryl St_ Pierre

Can you provide more information about the problem you are trying to solve? I think it is this, but we need more details about the requirements:

it does not allow a single status tracking view for the requester.

When you say "requester" are you talking about a JSM Customer? Do you want JSM customer requests to be equivalent to Epics?

If so, and child issues were created for the Epics, what reporting/visibility would you require the customer to have into these child issues?

What information are you trying to make available to the requester when you say "single status tracking view"?

Darryl St_ Pierre

Great questions @Trudy P Claspill , and I realized I left an element out of this - use of the Team field. Business owner wants to be able to assign different teams to different child issues, which is fine until you get to subtasks which inherit the parent team and cannot be modified.

Yes, Requester = JSM customer, and I guess the intent is to make the initial submission an Epic.

Since all the Customer knows would be their submission, I believe the desire is to show a consolidated view of the status of each of the child issues. I'm under the impression, perhaps incorrectly, that linking alone will not accomplish this for the Customer.

Trudy P Claspill

The customer portal doesn't provide a method to show child issues or linked issues when viewing a Request. If the requester views the Request/Epic they submitted, there will not be any information about the related issues.

The customer could view the related issues separately, if those related issues have a Request Type assigned to them and the requester is either the Reporter or the request has been Shared with them.

You could add a custom number field to the issue type, and add that custom number field to the request form for the Request Type associated to the Epic issue type. You could use an Automation Rule to update the custom number field periodically to show a "percent complete" value. The requester would be able to see that information through the customer portal.

JSM is not my area of expertise, but I'm fairly certain that native capabilities don't exist for providing any sort of reporting to the customers besides their ability to see individual requests through the customer portal. You could potentially use Automation Rules to collect the Epic/Child information and send the requester and email directly through the Automation Rule. I'm sure there are also third party apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace that could help with providing reports to requesters.

Elitsa Velikova _Nemetschek Bulgaria_

Hi @Darryl St_ Pierre ,

Your challenge—providing JSM customers with a consolidated status tracking view for their request and its related issues—can be solved with our app Advanced Portal Reports:

Customers can see all linked or child issues directly in the portal, eliminating the need to rely on email updates.
Admins can create a report layout (Global View) that displays Epics (or any other parent issues), their statuses, and linked issues—allowing portal customers to access this view directly.
Customers will only see requests they have permission to view, ensuring secure and relevant access to information.
Customers can filter requests and export reports, ensuring they always have up-to-date information without agent intervention.

If you think this solution can work for your scenario, we can have a demo session to discuss it further.

Kind regards,

Elitsa

Darryl St_ Pierre

I turned it over to the business owner with "no guarantees, explicit or implied" about whether it will work 100% correctly. Haven't received any feedback yet but will provide updates when I do.

Trudy P Claspill

I'm glad you found a solution.

In the Customer Portal are the customers able to see the Epic and its child issues in a hierarchical view?

Travis

This is a really common need — and unfortunately, as others have noted, the portal just doesn't show child issues or linked issue progress natively. The custom number field + automation workaround can technically work, but it's brittle (especially once you have multiple epics or subtask hierarchies) and it won't give customers any real context about what's happening, just a number.

Full disclosure: I'm one of the developers behind an app called Prism for Jira Service Management, and this is exactly the problem we built it to solve. Prism links JSM service requests to Jira Software issues (including epics and stories) and surfaces real-time progress bars and completion milestones directly on the customer portal — so your customers can actually see how the work under their epic is progressing without needing Jira access or agents manually updating a percentage field.

It runs natively on Atlassian Forge (no external servers), so there's nothing to host or manage. If you want to take a look: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1427587610/prism-for-jira-service-management

Happy to answer any questions about whether it fits your specific epic → child issue setup.

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