Prevent Rank Changes

[Andrew Ballantyne]

Hello there,

I'm trying to write an automation rule to prevent reordering of rank on our Epic Kanban board. Mainly so our filters can continue using ORDER BY Rank and be against an official order.

The end goal here is to limit the users to our Project Managers for ordering of Epics. It's a very easy activity to accidentally shift an Epic on a backlog and no audit to know who did it to help educate them away from that accidental action.

My two problems achieving this so far are:

1. Setting the Trigger to target Rank
   • I tried field change with various attempts to find "Rank"
2. Preventing the action
   • In my attempts to just prevent say Assignee from being set, I can't seem to find a way to prevent the action from being completed

Is this a legit goal/usage of Jira Automation?

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Andrew

[John Funk · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrew - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Automation Rules are not capable of preventing anything, including reordering. They only fire in response to a trigger happening and then perform some type of action. 

To prevent a user from being able to reorder cards based on Rank, simply remove their permission to the Schedule Issues permission in the Permission scheme attached to the project. 

[Andrew Ballantyne]

I appreciate the quick response, John! That's what I was fearing. We went down the scheduling path before and it caused unintended side-effects. I'll need to google more and see if there are more docs around Scheduling and working around those side-effects. 

Thanks again!

[John Funk]

Yes, one of the other side effects is that the user cannot enter estimates. 

[Vijay Wagh]

@John Funk Is it possible in the team based project ?  I can'not see the option to prevent rank changes

[John Funk]

No, rules cannot do that.