Synchronizing issue rank on a team board centrally utilizing Plan

[Tom Puusola]

Hi, 

My goal is to centrally manage the order (rank) of Initiatives, Epics and Tasks utilizing Plan and then have this order visible for multiple teams on their own boards for issues assigned to the team. Since the amount of issues is large, I need to do this central ranking only on Initiative and Epic levels. 

My problem is that while the change in order of Initiatives or Epics on Plan works fine on the team board, the child tasks don't follow this order and, therefore, the teams don't see right order for tasks but only for Epics and Initiatives. 

Since I cannot access the Rank directly with automation, I've tried to solve this creating a custom field Parent Rank;

• When the parent Epic or Initiative is updated, an automation copies the parent's Rank value to the child Parent Rank
• Then I order all issues on board ORDER BY Parent Rank ASC, Rank ASC. 

However, this doesn't work - the Task-level issues don't follow this order. Please help me out with this dilemma. Any workarounds of other approaches to this problem?

Br, Tom

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Tom Puusola 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

Have you confirmed that the Parent Rank field is getting updated by the Automation in the manner you expect? Changing the rank/position of Initiatives and Epics in a Plan will not immediately change the underlying issue rank. You have to review the changes in the Plan and then commit them to issues.

What is the field type of the Parent Rank field you created?

What sort of values are you actually getting in the Parent Rank field in the child issues? Can you provide examples of the values you see?

Can you provide screen images showing

- the issue hierarchy in your Plan before changing a parent issue rank, and

- the ordering of issues in a board that uses your new ORDER BY clause before changing a parent issue rank, and 

- the issue hierarchy in your Plan after changing a parent issue rank, and

- the ordering of issues in a board that uses your new ORDER BY clause  after changing a parent issue rank in the plan and committing those changes