Jira Plans Hierarchy
Asked by dyun1dyun1:

I am currently using Hierarchy in the following setup. Initiative, Epic, and Story.

I want to add another level above Initiative Hierarchy to further group out issues and wan to make sure it doesn't impact other issues in our project?


Answers:
author: John Funk
body: Hi [@dyun1dyun1](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4451946) - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Adding another level above will no affect your current issues. Feel free to add that level.

comments: author: dyun1dyun1
body: Thank you!


author: John Funk
body: You are welcome!


author: Robert Wen_ReleaseTEAM_
body: hello [@dyun1dyun1](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4451946) , Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

So, when using Plans/Advanced Roadmaps, if you set your hierarchy, it will be applied to ALL projects in the Jira instance.

You can make sure the issue type above Initiatives isn't seen in other projects using Issue Type Schemes, but overall, you can't set one hierarchy for one project and another hierarchy for the other projects.


author: Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira
body: Hi [@dyun1dyun1](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4451946),

welcome to the community!

As already mentioned, Jira's built-in hierarchy is global per site, so you couldn't add an additional hierarchy level without impacting all other projects, too.

What you can do, however, is to create issue links between your epics and your initiatives. These issue links aren't by default "understood" as parent/child relationships by Jira, which means that,

* As an advantage, they don't impact your global issue hierarchy.
* As a disadvantage, apart from seeing the issue link when opening an epic or initiative, you don't really get any hierarchy-related features in Jira.

This being said, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you'll have options available. I'll provide more information below.

Best,

Hannes

comments: author: Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira
body: ... and to expand on my last point: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, I believe that your use case could be solved very elegantly using the app that my team and I are working on, [JXL for Jira](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1224710?hosting=datacenter&tab=overview&utm_source=atlassian-community&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=2742269).

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 epic/story, and story/sub-task), and/or based on issue links of configurable issue link types. So if you'd establish issue links from your epics to your initiatives, and model the respective hierarchy in JXL, you'd end up with a view like e.g. this:

![initiative-hierarchy.gif](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/339453iFF30045594FE6514/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "initiative-hierarchy.gif")

This hierarchy would be specific to your JXL sheet and therefore not affect any other projects. Issue hierarchies also play well with JXL's other advanced features, such as *issue grouping* by any issue field(s), *sum-ups* , or *conditional formatting* .

Any questions just let me know!


Tags: data-center

jira-data-center