Resolving conflict between roadmap priority and hierarchy structure of tickets in projects

[Trevor Adams]

I want to be able to set up the advance roadmap so that I can prioritize Epics and Enhancements at the same level. We have large bodies of work (epics) and small bodies of work (enhancements) that we want to prioritize against each other on a single roadmap. This doesn't seem like a far fetched concept to me? In order to view epics and enhancements on the same level in the roadmap you have to adjust the hierarchy. If you adjust the hierarchy then it messes up the project backlog view and you can no longer see enhancements unless you enable epics but then it's not in the same backlog list. 

Is there something I'm missing so that I can have one roadmap view and prioritize epics and enhancements together without messing up the backlog view? 

Having epics and enhancements separated out in the advance roadmap view seems counter productive when we have one pool of work we have to prioritize and plan for. I basically want epics/enhancements on the same level in the roadmap but for enhancements to still show up in the backlog like user stories. 

It seems this can't be done in jira currently, does anyone have other suggestions or ideas for how we can prioritize our work in a single view with epics/enhancements in the same priority list? 

Thanks for any help.

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Trevor Adams 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

To ensure we have all the information about your scenario:

1. In what type of project do your Epics and Enhancements exist? Get that information from the Type column on the View All Projects page under the Projects menu.

2. What type of board are you using; Scrum or Kanban?

3. Do you want Enhancements to be equivalent to Epics from an Issue Type Hierarchy perspective? As in, both Epics and Enhancements could have child issues of the same types (Story, Task, Bug), and Enhancements could not be children of Epics?

4. Do you want to prioritize Enhancements against Epics or against the issue types that can be children of Epics?

[Trevor Adams]

Hello Trudy! Thank you for your response. 

1. We use company managed software projects

2. We use both depending on the team. Most development teams use scrum boards. We use a kanban board for groups outside of engineering to submit enhancement requests and bug tickets. Our advance roadmap pulls in tickets from the kanban board and 4 dev team scrum boards.

3. Yes, I would like Epics and Enhancements to be on the same hierarchy level so that we can prioritize them next to each other on the advanced roadmap. Currently enhancements are grouped separately, below epics and we cannot easily prioritize all work against each other. We typically do not add user stories or other child tickets to enhancements. If we get an enhancement request that is large and would require many user stories, we will change the ticket type to be an epic. But if the enhancement request is about a single user story worth of work we will leave it as an enhancement. 

4. We want to prioritize enhancements and epics at the same level. We consider these complete scopes of work that are releasable. So an epic is only releasable when all user stories are done. An enhancement is releasable when the requirements for that enhancement are done. We explored always creating an epic but it seemed unnecessary when that epic would only have 1 user story so instead it's just create an enhancement request. 

I recently updated the hierarchy so that enhancements were the same level as epics. Worked great and solved our need on the advanced roadmap for prioritizing. But it broke all of our dev team scrum boards because enhancements were removed from the backlog and grouped as epics. We still want to assign out individual enhancements in sprints.  

[Trudy Claspill]

Thank you for that additional information @Trevor Adams 

I have not been able to think of a work around for your situation.

To see the Epics and Enhancements at the same level in the Plan, they must be at the same level in the Hierarchy. But that does, indeed, remove Enhancements from the issue list and add them to the Epics panel when viewing an scrum board backlog.

If having them at the same level in the Plan is only to enable you to drag and drop them for prioritization against each other, you could use a Kanban board for that. You could create and save a filter to select only the Epics and Enhancements, create a Kanban board from that, set the display of Epics to be in the Backlog.

That would enable you to see both Epics (at hierarchy level 1) and Enhancements (at hierarchy level 0) in one list for prioritization. 

But if you specifically want to see that prioritization also within the Plan you will have to have the Enhancements at level 1 instead.

Note that whichever method you choose, changing the relative priority of Epics vs. Enhancements in this manner will not change the priority of the Enhancements relative to the child issues of the Epics. If you elect to move the Enhancements back to level 0 so that they will show in the Backlog on the scrum board, their prioritization relative to the child issues (of Epics) in the Backlog will not be representative of their prioritization relative to the parent Epics.

[Trevor Adams]

Thank you for the information and help. 

One additional thing we use the advanced roadmap for his helping plan out sprints and use the capacity planning tools. It's nice to be able to see what's currently in progress and then what we plan the next 3-6 months for with story point estimates and capacity of each team in their sprints. So having the tickets grouped together for priority would be nice to have. 

I'll have to continue to think of alternative options. Thanks again!