JPD, Parent Field and Advanced Plans

[Christy Johnston]

We're looking for a way to have Ideas on the Product Discovery Board included on an Advanced Plan along with other existing Jira Software Projects. Currently, JPD doesn't have a parent field so it ends up not working well as a timeline option. Any ideas on if there is a way to use Initiatives or Epics as a "Parent"?

[Mirko Grahnert]

Totally agree with @Christy Johnston - not being able to use JPD tickets as parent tasks in Jira Plans is a major limitation for us. We use JPD as a high-level bird's-eye view of the work that is being delivered. 

[Gergely Fehér]

In my mind, Initiatives and Epics are for the delivery side, while JPD is the ideation phase - so I would not mix up the 2 things this way. Ideas should be much more children of goals - and these goals could be used from Atlas.

[Christy Johnston]

Excellent point. However, we use the ideas as part of our Roadmap Development process. Once an Idea goes through Product Development (all tracked on JDP) it turns into a project on a Jira Software Project. However, we'd like to use Advance Planning to determine where this new project will live amongst the approved Projects on the Jira Software Roadmap. Advanced Plan is a great option for this but as a visual, it's not very nice unless we can connect an Idea to an Initiative. When working across 10+ Product Managers and 5+ Departments (translation, a ton of stakeholders with competing priorities, a staging ground for roadmap planning between Ideas and Projects would be a nice win. 

[Rohan Swami]

@Christy Johnston My recommendation is that you link ideas to Initiatives, and the Initiative is the parent to Epics. Here's a Loom demo on using Jira Product Discovery with Jira Software, and the specific part about Advanced Roadmaps/Plans is at 7:35.

[Christy Johnston]

I love this idea but I can't figure out how to link the two as I can't find a Parent field on the Idea. Any thoughts?

[Rohan Swami]

@Christy Johnston you link an idea to an initiative the same way that you link an idea to an Epic. There are a few different ways you can do this:

1. To create a new initiative: In the Delivery tab of the idea select 'Create a delivery ticket' then select the Initiative issue type. See the screenshot below.
2. To link an idea to an existing initiative: In the Delivery tab of the idea select 'Add a delivery ticket' and select the initiative from the search results.

Under the hood, the relationship between an idea and initiatives/epics/stories is a special type of issue link, not a parent/child relationship which is why the Parent field isn't used here.

Idea to delivery tickets relationship:

[JCameron]

This is our current setup and the general feeling internally is that the separation between Idea and Initiative results in a completely unnecessary indirection/redundancy. When we heard that Ideas were going to become available in Plans soon we got excited and thought we would be able to deprecate Initiatives. Functionally, something going from idea on a roadmap over to something being worked on is a status change. It's very frustrating how Atlassian puts some of these hard boundaries in place to try and force companies to work in very specific ways that create more "paperwork" for no additional value to them. We love how JPD has allowed us to have better discussions and assessments of our initiative backlog, but really don't like needing an actual Initiative issue type simply to structure the work on a Jira Plan correctly.

We have similar complaints around not being able to use Assets on various UIs as a sorting and grouping field. Why can't I group issues in a plan by Asset like I can Components?

[Andrea Egert]

+1 @Christy Johnston and @Mirko Grahnert

From a planning point of view, we also have an urgent need to display JPD tickets (discovery initiatives) alongside Jira tickets (delivery initiatives) in Jira Advanced Roadmaps.

Any suggestions for interim workarounds (without Atlas) are welcome!

[Christy Johnston]

We ended up making an interim Jira Software Project/Board for items not yet ready for execution but needed for roadmap planning. We then used the Advanced Plan feature to show this Interim board and the final working boards.