hierarchy set up for different uses

[Louise Wharton]

Does anyone know of a way to have a hierarchy set up so you can have epics within themes which sit within an initiative but also so they can sit in the initiative without being in a theme

so

>Initiative

>>Theme or Epic

>>> Epic or other issues 

>>>>other issues  

[Mark Segall]

Hi @Louise Wharton and welcome to the community!

The issue hierarchy for advanced roadmaps is rigid so you cannot have issue types appear at multiple levels.  This is because best practice is that your levels above the epic typically tie to business objectives based upon top-down strategy (e.g. company OKR, departmental OKR).  With this mindset, an epic would never skip a level.

If this is not how your company is organized, you may want to consider a marketplace app like structure.

[Margo Sakova - OKR Board for Jira by Oboard]

Hi @Mark Segall 

From what I've understood, you've used issue hierarchy from the Advanced Roadmaps to structure your OKRs. Just today I published an article covering this Jira OKR setup (and a couple of more).

Can I ask you to look through it and share some feedback?
I was experimenting there, and would love to hear first-hand experience 😊

[Mark Segall]

@Margo Sakova - OKR Board for Jira by Oboard - Thank you for sharing this.  It is quite exhaustive (in a good way) and you captured numerous methods that I have similarly employed on various projects. My only recommendation is to actually capture it as an article here on the Atlassian community to prevent your link from getting lost in a single question on this topic. 

[Margo Sakova - OKR Board for Jira by Oboard]

Glad to hear that 😊
I'm not sure if such HUGE posts will fit the community format. Maybe I'll collect the initial feedback, and then share a shortened version of it here.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Louise Wharton,

just adding to Mark's answer: There's actually a number of hierarchy-focused apps on the Marketplace that allow more freedom in how you set up your issue hierarchies. Since Jira's built-in parent-child relationships are somewhat limiting, they often rely on issue links (or a combination of built-in relationships and issue links) to model these hierarchies. If a Marketplace app is an option to you, I'd suggest trying out a few - you can trial every app for free for 1 month - and see which one solves your use cases best.