Portfolio Themes not propigating for new issues

Question

Hello,

I am trying to use themes in my portfolio project.  Since there is not a way to filter on specific initiatives or epics, I am using themes to group the initiatives/epics/stories that logically fit together into a business objective.  This allows me to filter on each theme (business objective) to only see a view of that objective.

When I mark an initiative with a theme, it automatically assigns all epics and all stories underneath that initiative to the theme (which is what I want).  The problem is when a new story is entered by the Product Owner, and it's linked to an epic, which is already linked to the initiative which was marked with the theme, the story doesn't automatically get added to the theme, which means I have to keep resetting the theme at the initiative level to make sure new stories (and Epics) attached to that initiative are added to the theme.

Ultimately I'm just looking for a way to filter my portfolio by initiatives.  Am I going at it the right way with Themes, or is there some other way I should be approching this problem?

PhillipS · Answer

Hi Allard,

While searching the feature request project you pointed me to I found this request:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-1608?jql=text%20~%20%22portfolio%20themes%22

This is exactly what I'm looking for.  I've watched and voted up the issue.

Allard van Helbergen · Answer

Hey @PhillipS,

Thanks for your extensive reply. That cleared up a few things for me. You are doing everything in the correct manner.

Which is to say, sorry but no, there is currently no way to automatically add a theme to newly created issues. We don't do this as themes are often across many issues contained in initiatives. So any single initiative the would contribute to multiple themes.

You can file a feature request for this, if you would like.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

Cheers,
Allard

PhillipS · Answer

Hello Allard,

This is what I'm doing today, execpt, instead of setting each individual story to a theme, because I am able to group my themes by 1 or many initiatives at my org, I am setting the theme on the initiative, which sets the theme to all lower level Epics and stories in that initative.

This gives me the filtering ability I am looking for, but, the problem is that when new issues are created that eventually roll up into that initiative that is set to a theme, even though I set the iniative to the theme originally, it doesn't carry over to the new issues automatically, I have to reset the initative to the theme, which then sets all new stories under epics under that initative to the theme.

Eventually my manual workflow every morning is the following:

* Come in and load up my portfolio to see all initatives.
* Reset all initiatives to their currently selected theme
* new stories that were created yesterday under each initiative are now set correctly to the appropriate theme for filtering
* commit changes
* now i can sort based off of theme and make sure it's showing everything intended in the theme.

Like everything else in Portfolio, I was hoping that there was a way to have the theme "auto-set" based on it's parent (epic or initiative) when it is created and pulled in automatically, but it doesn't seem this is possible.

Is it possible, or is there another way to sort that I'm not exploring such that i can cut out this manual process every morning?