How to display the progress of Epics or Initiatives in Jira or Confluence by using Great Gadgets app

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Managing large projects often requires a higher level of organization, and Epics play a crucial role in structuring that. Keeping track of Epic progress is essential for ensuring that your team stays aligned and meets project goals. We’ll explore in this blog post why tracking Epics is important and how Great Gadgets can help you display epic progress on your Jira dashboards or in Confluence pages.

What is an Epic in Jira? But an Initiative or Theme?

Epics are foundational to organizing large projects in Jira. An Epic is a large body of work that can be broken down into smaller tasks or stories. Epics represent major features or goals within a project, and tracking their progress is critical for understanding how close you are to completing the overall goal.

Each Epic contains multiple child issues (stories, tasks, etc.), and it’s important to monitor how these contribute to the Epic’s progress.

By using Advanced Roadmaps for Jira you can add additional hierarchy levels on top of the Epic level. These issue types are portfolio level issues and are usually named Initiative or Theme, and are used to group multiple epics.

Why Track Progress at Epic, Initiatives or Theme level?

With a clear view of Epic progress, teams keep their focus on key deliverables. Having the ability to visualize the Epics progress on dashboards ensures everyone is aligned with the bigger picture.

Tracking the progress at initiative or theme level in Jira shows the progress towards achieving the organization’s strategic goals.

By using the Great Gadgets add-on for Jira and Confluence, you can effectively track not only the progress at the Epic level but also the progress at Initiative or Theme level.

Show the progress of the Epics in the form of tables, heat maps, or charts

The Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets app allows you to generate and display pivot tables or pivot charts based on issues in your Jira instance using drag & drop functionality, as you do it with tools like Excel, for example. With this gadget you can configure and display multi-dimensional tables or heatmap tables showing issue count, sum of numeric issue fields (such as Story Points), or percentages. It can also display the data in form of charts of various types.

When it comes to your Epics, the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offers various ways of displaying the epic’s progress. By using this gadget you can slice and dice your data, creating custom tables that will give a more clear view of your epics, helping you track progress in a way that makes sense for your project’s unique needs.

Here are some examples on how to display the epic status by using the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget.

Progress of Epics by Percentage of Completion

This is one of the most convenient and easy ways to display the progress of the epics. The Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget lets you calculate and display the completion of the epics based on their child issues (Stories, Tasks and even Sub-tasks). It can calculate the progress based on the current status of the issues, by the current status category (To Do, In Progress and Done), or by issue count or sum of a numeric field such as Story Points.

In this example, the progress is calculated as a percentage of Story Points in each Status Category. To achieve this, the gadget should be configured like this:

The gadget can be easily reconfigured to display the data in other ways:

• As heatmap table – for this, just set the output of the gadget to Table Heatmap.

• As chart – for this, just set the output of the gadget to a chart type, such as Multiple Pie Chart or Stacked Bar Chart.

Epics by No. of Tasks In Each Status or Status Category

By using the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets app, you can display various statistics about your epics. A common one could be the count of items in each status or status category, eventually split by issue type.

Epics by Sum of Story Points in Each Status or Status Category

To display the sum of a numeric field, such as Story Points at epic level, you can use the same  Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offered by Great Gadgets app. The gadget allows you to split data by many fields. In this example, the data is split by Status Category.

Epics Breakdown Showing Progress By Status

The Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) gadget offered by Great Gadgets app helps you visualize the hierarchy of epics and their child issues in a structured, tree-like format along with their current status, thus giving you a quick overview of the project work and progress.

All you have to do is configure it with a filter or JQL that returns the issues to be grouped (epics, stories, sub-tasks, etc.) and you will have the structure displayed in a few seconds. Watch this video to learn more about how you can configure the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) gadget.

If the filter or the JQL used as data source for the gadget returns any Initiatives or Themes, they will also be displayed in the hierarchy on top of the epics.

Epics Progress in the form of Epic Burndown Chart

Great Gadgets app offers a very useful Release Burndown Burnup Chart gadget that lets you display burndown charts for your epics. This gadget not only displays current progress against planned work but can also forecast the ETA of your epics based on current velocity.

The same gadget can be used to generate and display a burndown chart for an initiative or a theme, as well as cross-initiative or cross-theme. All you have to do is configure it with a filter or JQL that returns all the issues under the initiative(s) or the theme(s) that you want to track.

For more details on how to configure this gadget, see How to create an epic burndown or burnup chart in Jira and Confluence with Great Gadgets app.

Tracking the progress of the Initiatives or Themes

The above examples for tracking epics can also be applied to tracking Initiatives and Themes. By using the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget you can display all kinds of multi-dimensional statistics and charts about Initiatives and Themes. By using the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) gadget you can display the items of the Initiates and Themes in a tree structure along with their status, and by using the Release Burndown Burnup Chart gadget you can easily create an initiative burndown chart.

All you need to do is use the appropriate parent field instead of the Parent Epic field in the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget configuration:

• Parent of Epic – for Hierarchy Level 2 issues (one level above Epic)
• Parent L3 – for Hierarchy Level 3 issues (two levels above Epic)

In addition, in all the gadgets, you will also need to use a JQL or filter that returns the issues under the initiatives or the themes that you want to track.

For example, for a filter or JQL to return the child issues of initiatives DEMO-11 and DEMO-12, you will have to make use of the portfolioChildIssuesOf JQL function, as in this example:

key IN portfolioChildIssuesOf("DEMO-11") OR 
key IN portfolioChildIssuesOf("DEMO-12") ...

Conclusion

Managing large projects in Jira often requires robust tools to track progress and ensure alignment with project goals. Epics play a vital role in organizing these projects, and tracking their progress is key to successful delivery. By using gadgets like Pivot Table & Pivot Chart, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) or Release Burndown Burnup Chart offered by Great Gadgets, you can make your Jira dashboards more insightful, streamline workflows, and keep your projects on track.

Implement these gadgets today to gain a comprehensive view of your progress at Epic, Initiative or Theme level and lead your team to success!