JIRA Portfolio Ignoring Priority

[chadsmom]

I'm confused why JIRA portfolio is ignoring the priority in my scope table.  Here is my issue right now:

• I have 33 Epics planned out for the year, in priority order, with releases assigned to each one.  Currently releases are based on Quarters.
• I set a "Target End" for every item
• I will have 5 total teams working on this project

The problem I'm having is Portfolio seems to be completely ignoring my priority for one of my Epics.  Out of the 33 Epics, it's currently listed as #3 in the list with a release date of Q1.  The amount of work is slightly more than 1 sprint for the team the is working on it based on their calculated velocity.  However, no matter what I do, Portfolio continues to schedule this Epic spanning over 6 months, and prioritizes items lower than it to be finished earlier.  

How can I enforce the priority scheduling?  I don't want to set up hard dependencies since I want to be able to start other features without a dependency needing to be 100% complete.  I'm confused why Portfolio isn't scheduling the work for my #3 priority Epic to be finished before the others.  

Happy to provide the settings I'm using if that will help.

[chadsmom · Accepted solution]

I ended up figuring this out through some trial and error.  Portfolio will ignore your Epic rank if that Epic has children stories assigned to it.  Since I had some stories created for one of my epics and they were at the bottom of the backlog in JIRA, this essentially trumped my Epic ranking and it used the ranking of the children, thus making it the last ranked Epic in Portfolio even though it was #3 in the list.  This is why it wouldn't schedule it ahead of others.  

I really wish there was an option for Portfolio to be the source of truth for ranking and apply that ranking to all of its children, which could then be committed to your JIRA backlog.  That would make prioritization from a higher level much, much easier, and make Portfolio more useful in my opinion.  

[Wendi Pannell]

Have you found any add'l findings with this issue. We are having a similar issue. It's also very difficult since when you look at portfolio everything looks like it should be in order - only to find a child that doesn't even show up in portfolio is messing up your prioritization.