Support for dependencies between initiatives

[Rob Manger]

Hi guys,

Currently having a look at JIRA Portfolio to determine whether it meets our needs.  One of the questions I've come across is that currently dependencies can only be set between Epics and Stories, not Initiatives.  This does not suit our real world scenarios.  Our initiatives fall into several areas, data warehousing, report generation and product development being some of the main ones.  We have dependencies between all of these which we can currently not capture.  These cannot be created as epics as they have different business drivers.  So the question is why not have dependencies between initiatives?

Rob

[Rob Manger]

Thanks for the prompt reply, Martin.

I was afraid that was going to be the answer 

Cheers

Rob

[Martin Suntinger]

Hey Rob, we originally haven't built dependencies for initiatives as initiatives were seen as grouping elements rather than work items like epics and stories. This is why also it is not possible to add an estimate to an initiative directly while it does not have child epics, whilst the same is possible for an epic. It's been an implementation choice that constrains us now, and requires more significant restructuring in the backend to enable dependencies on that level too. We'll change that down the road, but currently the only option is really to create the dependencies between all the child epics. Best, Martin (Product Manager for JIRA Portfolio)