Issues with use of initiatives

[D]

Hi,

I just set up a company managed software project (Kanban). I am in need of an additional hierarchy level above epic.

So I added issuetype initiatve to the company managed project and it already automatically does have hierarchie level 2 (which in jira notation is one above epic with 1, tasks/bug with 0 and sub tasks with -1). So the setup should be fine.

I created one epic and one initative as test issues. I wanted to add the epic as a child to the initiative but I am not able to do it - there is no option for this.

Info: I am on the free plan, might this be the reason?

How do I fix this?

Tbh the use of initiaties is kind of frustrating as there seem to be so many hurdles. Why can't I just use them easiliy the way I can use an epic to task relationship?

Thank you so much for your support!

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @D,

Additional hierarchy levels above epics are part of Jira Software's premium plan and require the Plans feature to leverage them.

As soon as you're there, the hurdles you refer to will no longer be there.

Hope this clarifies!

[D]

Thanks Walter, saved me a lot of frustration ;)

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @D

just to add to Walter's answer: If you don't intend to upgrade to Premium, you can always leverage issue links to model parent/child relationships between issues; e.g., there is a built-in is parent of / is child of issue link type, but you can also configure your own.

The downside is that Jira doesn't really recognise issue links as hierarchies, and therefore doesn't offer any relevant features.

This being said, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there's a number of hierarchy-focused apps available that can help with this. As an example, my team and I work on an app in which your hierarchy would be easy to model also on Standard or Free plans: JXL for Jira:

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. These issue hierarchies can be based on Jira's built-in parent/child relationships (like task/sub-task, or epic/story), and/or based on issue links of configurable issue link types. In the above example, epics relate to their parent initiatives through issue links of type is parent of / is child of.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes