An Alternative for Initiative issue type

[Ifat Keren]

Hello, would be happy to hear your thoughts:

I would like to create one Jira project for a software team to manage all their missions there.

They are working on some long-term plans (let's say more than 4 months or even ongoing), and every such should be divided into smaller phases.

I assume the correct way is to create an initiative for every big plan and underneath to create Epics.

But -

What should I do if the client won't purchase Jira Premium? Can I create a higher hierarchy above Epic without the Premium?

Thanks ahead

[Rahul_RVS]

Hi @Ifat Keren 

You can use generic Issue Links to create your own hierarchy. But Jira will not recognize that and you will need a custom solution to visualize this type of structure.

If your client is open for a mktplace solution (cost efficient too), you can try out our add-on.

Issue Hierarchy Reports 

Disclaimer : I am part of the team which developed this app

[Chris Dunne _Raledo_]

Hi,

If you are open to using other Marketplace addons, there are plenty available e.g. Structure and JXL.

We have come across this issue plenty of times in our services work. As pointed out in previous replies, you can use issue linking although in our experience users found it quite 'clunky' and often selected the wrong issue type link which caused further confusion down the road.

We also tried labels and custom fields. The problem with labels is that they are essentially uncontrolled. People end up choosing the wrong label, creating additional labels due to misspellings, and generally after some time you end up with a mess.

Custom fields are better, but then as new initiatives are created, you need to update the custom field and that requires a Jira Admin. This can lead to delays and may not prove to be very scalable. It also means you have a simple custom field representing an initiative and so you don't really have any place to store additional information about that initiative e.g. a description, status, assignee.

We decided to build our own Forge addon for this scenario. Simple Issue Links (free addon). It allows you to define a new custom field which is essentially a dynamic select list. The values of the select list are the results of a JQL query.

To cater for your scenario, we create a Initiative Issue Type. The we create a new custom field using the addon called Parent Initiative. We define the JQL as issuetype = Initiative. And we add this field to the Epic screens.

Now we can store information about the Initiative, just like a regular issue. And we can add new initiatives without the need to ask an admin to update the custom field.

You may want to take this further and in the Initiative show a list of all the Epics related to the Initiative. For that we have another addon called Show Related Issues. If you are interested in learning more about how to use that for your scenario, let me know and I'd be happy to walk you through it.

Chris

[Trudy Claspill]

You can also use generic issue linking to artificially create a parent/child link between an Initiative type issue and an Epic type issue. However, Jira will not recognize that as a parent/child relationship. None of the built-in parent/child relationship functionality would automatically work with such a link.

[Jack Brickey]

Hi @Ifat Keren , OOTB Jira Standard does not provide more hierarchies as you know. Options to consider...

• use Labels to define initiatives
• use Components to define initiatives 
• use a custom field to define initiatives 

If any of the above scenarios could work for you, I would also recommend leveraging automation to help ensure issues get assigned to the proper initiative. This could be achieved if everything belongs to an epic, and an epic will only be associated to a single initiative which should be the case.

[Kelly Arrey]

Hi @Ifat Keren, 

We use Structure by Tempo to implement a hierarchy above Epics. Here are links to an article and a webinar explaining how we did it in some detail.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Structure by Tempo except as a happy customer. 

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @Ifat Keren

as already mentioned, there's a few ways to "hack" (for the lack of a better word) an additional hierarchy level, e.g. via issue linking, or by using certain issue field values. The challenge is always that Jira wouldn't "understand" that these things are supposed to represent a hierarchy level. This being said, there's various apps from the Atlassian Marketplace that can help with that. Chris was kind enough to mention the app that my team and I are working on, JXL for Jira. Just to provide a bit more context:

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. It also comes with a number of advanced features, including support for configurable issue hierarchies (based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships, and/or issue links), issue grouping by any issue field(s), or any combination of these.

With these, you can organise your issues in any hierarchy that you want, using any of the two mentioned approaches. In the following, I'm switching between an field-value approach (in this case, based on labels) and an issue-link based approach:

Once you've set up your perfect view, you can work on your issues directly in JXL, trigger various operations in Jira, or export your issues with just one click.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes