How do you temporarily hide the hierarchy on a plan?

[Mark Poncelet]

Given a hierarchy like this:

Initiative -> Project -> Epic -> Story

We want to create most of our plans showing the hierarchy, with projects nested under initiatives, and epics under projects, etc.  This works great when setting the parent of each issue type.

However, we also want to create a plan where only Epics are listed so that we can order them by rank and drag and drop the Epics to adjust their rank.

Our problem is that once we give all those issue types a parent, they're always nested whenever we create a new plan, even if we hide the Initiative and Project custom issue types from the plan.

Is there a way to create a plan that creates a flat list of Epics that we can adjust the rank on?

[Joseph Chung Yin · Accepted solution]

@Mark Poncelet -

This is simple, you just need to change the change the Hierarchy filter to start with Epic and not Initiative -

Example:

 

However, if you want a plan to exclude Initiative by default, then you need to configure your issue sources to not to pull in the issue type from the project.

Hope this helps.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Technology Applications Team

Viasat Inc.

[Mark Poncelet]

Thank you for your help! This was exactly what we needed. For anyone who may come across this with the same question, here's the setup that we made that works:

We created one plan with a board for the issue source. This board only shows epics, stories and tasks, which prevents the issue types that are higher up in the hierarchy from being shown.  This is the plan we use to drag and drop epics to adjust their rank, just as you might do in a board's backlog for adjusting the rank of stories and tasks.

Next, we created a filter that included the full hierarchy for a second plan. The second plan shows the parent-child relationship for our issues for the full hierarchy.  Sprints can't be set (since you can only do that if a board is your issue source) but you can still see the sprint that an item has been set to.  There's just a little "Ext" bubble next to it to remind you that the sprint information is external to the plan. 

So now our workflow involves opening two plans. The first plan is for setting ranks on epics, and the second plan is for telling our business story with the full hierarchical relationship, release milestones, and so on.