Automate Epics start/due dates based on estimated duration

[Ryan Läemmle]

Hello,

Experienced Jira user but amateur project creator here.....

I have been tasked with creating a project which has all the stages of our sales cycle in it.

We moved from Excel as it has many smaller pieces which require a lot of attention and have work from Sales, R&D, Engineering, delivery etc in it.

My dilemma..

We want to use this to obviously track progress, assign work etc but also want to use it to track durations and have a nice gannt chart view of estimated time (start to finish) and actual time for each piece. 

Each Epic or work item could have "gates" which need to be completed before moving on but does also have Epics which could run parallel.

These projects all have the same steps and i am using "Deep Clone" to move epics and work items to a new Project each time.

My questions:

1) should i be using a PM or Scrum style project?

1) Each Epic has child work items and has a specified "estimated" duration. How can i automatically set start and due dates cascading for each epic based off an initial start date and then consequently, the following epics based of estimated duration of each?

3) Should i rather be using sprints or is there automation that can help me here?