Can I skip the Epic level for Portfolio plugin

[Emily Daniel]

I have the scrum teams using Epic for different purposes. I have to track the Program at Initiative and Feature roll up. Can I directly link scrum level user stories to my features and skip the scrum board epic for Program roll up and roadmap?

[Stephen Wright _Elabor8_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Emily Daniel

You can - as a Site Admin you can:

1. Go to Jira Settings > Manage Apps
2. Select Portfolio Hierarchy Configuration from the left-hand menu
3. Add Story to the same level as Epic
4. Next, go to Jira Settings > Issues
5. Go to Screens, and locate all screens which are used by the Story issue type
6. Add the field "Parent Link" to these screens

^ Notably this changes the hierarchical configuration for everyone across your instance, this isn't a project-by-project structure.

I would be hesitant to remove Epics from your overall hierarchy - there are benefits Epics offer such as Epics Panel, Epics Burndown, etc which you will lose. 

What is the intent of linking direct to the next level up? What do you use Epics for instead?

Ste

[Emily Daniel]

The teams have already created their own epics to track to which does not fit with the capability model for the Portfolio and I do not want to disturb their team structure at this point if I can avoid it.

[Emily Daniel]

@Stephen Wright _Elabor8_  Thank you very much for the quick response.

[Stephen Wright _Elabor8_]

Fair enough, but I would consider if a transitional period would work to a new structure, if it's something you want to use in future in Portfolio :)

And no worries :D

Ste

[Emily Daniel]

For the executive roadmap I am ok to not go into an epic level - I can just show them how work (User story level) is feeding into their key initiatives > Features

For the Program level management at the release level - I plan to use the Release tag from the user story / the link to the feature on the program board to discuss progress. 

I am losing one level of granularity, which at this point I don't have any audience for.

[Devi karthikeyan]

@Stephen Wright _Elabor8_ 

Thanks for your Information,

But I am facing a problem when tried to follow your Hierarchy and the issue is;

I have Parent Link field in Story Screen and removed Epic Link as i am not going to use Epic in my projects. When the Epic Link is removed, I am not getting my Parent Link Field enabled to link any feature. At the same time when I include the Epic Link in my story screen and leave it blank then I can add the Feature link to Story.

Is there any way to enable parent Link without including the Epic Link in the story screen?

[Stephen Wright _Elabor8_]

Hi @Devi karthikeyan 

It will let you have Parent Link without Epic Link on the story screen - make sure you have:

• Followed the instructions above to move Story up to the same level as Epic in the hierarchy - this is now called Advanced Roadmaps.
• Removed any existing Epic Linked issues - an Epic and Parent Link cannot be active on one issue at the same time.

These are the steps I took to test it works just now on both Cloud and Server.

Ste

[Benjamin Peikes]

I agree. It's problematic that you can't have a Story that is a child of an Epic, and a Story that is not a child of an Epic.

An Epic is something that will require multiple Stories to implement, but a Story might completely describe a single user story that doesn't need a higher level.