Unable to assign story to Intiative

[Evgeniia Balyasina]

Hi Everyone.

we are using Jira cloud Premium. Every team has own project. And our idea was to use the Intiative as a place where we can overview all work needs to be done on cross-project level for specific client, incl. release. 

However, we found out, it is not possible to assign Stories to Initiative, only Epics. And for some tasks/stories it is hard to go with specific Epic. 

Did someone have same issue and find a solution? 

[Joseph Chung Yin]

@Evgeniia Balyasina -

Hi there:

When you define your Issue Hierarchy via AR, Initiative is to be setup as a parent of EPIC and not for Story issue type.  In Jira Story/Task issue type (Standard Issue Type) can only associate itself to an EPIC.

There is no solution allowing Story to be assigned to Initiative (by passing EPIC).  The only thing I can think of is for your to use "Link Issue" functionality to associate a Story to Initiative.  However, Link Issue setup will not be reflected in your AR plan.

Hope this helps.

Best, Joseph Chung Yin

Jira/JSM Functional Lead, Global Infrastructure Applications Team

Viasat Inc.

[Evgeniia Balyasina]

thanks @Joseph Chung Yin 

yes, the problem with Stories linked that we can't see it on Roadmap tool for example. 

Do you know if there is any other best practice? Or we should just always assign story to Epic? 

[david-guild]

@Joseph Chung Yin I am in the same boat as @Evgeniia Balyasina sort of.  In Agile, an Epic is *only* needed if a story will span multiple sprints, or if you have multiple stories that relate enough to be grouped under and epic.

If you have "one-off", small efforts, they don't fall cleanly into the hierarchy. This causes less then ideal situations when at scale ... mainly gobs and gobs of bookkeeping work.

To keep it "clean", when a one-off comes in, you need to create both an epic and the one-off, and maintain state (proper status) on both the epic and the story/task.  When the story/task is completed, you not only have to close out the epic, but go into the backlog report and archive the epic so it falls off the backlog report.

Tooo much work so we ended up just creating "generic" epics that are "always" open creating a bunch of noise and causes reporting problems. 

Burning Downs on Epics? Skewed by the always open epic.

Velocity on Epics? Skewed by the always open epics.

etc, etc.

The only solution I found was to create a new issue type that sits at the epic level .. however, that becomes confusing to users and creates usability issues.  It's really a no-win situation.