Can you customize issue hierarchy in a team-managed project

[kathleen_crowley]

When creating a team-managed project with custom issue types, can you also customize or add a hierarchy for these custom types?  I couldn't find a way.

[Samuel Gatica _ServiceRocket_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @kathleen_crowley  

In team-managed projects, Jira does not currently support customizing the issue hierarchy beyond the default levels (Epics, Tasks, and Subtasks).

If you need more customization for issue hierarchies, you can use Advanced Roadmaps to set up a more flexible hierarchy structure tailored to your needs.

• Limitations of team-managed projects in your plan 
• Set up issue types in team-managed projects 

Hope this helps!

Best regards

Sam

[Malene Vikkelsø]

Hi Sam,

Perhaps changes has been made to the product since your reply. I am having a hard time changing the issue hierarchy in Plans that does not change the issue hierarchy for the entire Jira instance, and there by changes the hierarchy in Company-managed projects as well?

So I do not understand how your suggestion of creating a custom issue hierarchy in Plans should assist me in getting extra levels in team-managed project.

BR Malene

[Cristian0791]

Hi Kathleen,

In team-managed projects, you can create custom issue types, but you cannot customize or add new hierarchy levels beyond the standard "Epic -> Issue -> Sub-task" hierarchy.

Epics are the top level of the hierarchy, and you cannot add levels above them or introduce a new hierarchy below epics.

Hope this helps.

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

Hi @kathleen_crowley

just to add to the previous answers: It's arguably a bit of a workaround, but what you can do is to model your hierarchy using issue links. Issue links can be established between any pair of issues, which means that you have full flexibility in the parent/child relationships you'd like to establish. E.g., you can define a new issue type "Initiative", create your initiative issues, and then issue-link them to your epics.

The downside here is that - since issue links can signify any kind of relationship between two issues - Jira doesn't really "understand" them as parent/child relationships, and therefore doesn't give you hierarchy-related features.

This being said, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, there's a number of hierarchy-focused apps available that can help with this. I'll add more information below.

Hope this helps,

Best,

Hannes

[Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira]

... and just to expand on the above: If you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, my team and I work on an app in which your use case would be easy to solve, JXL for Jira.

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 task/sub-task, or epic/story), and/or based on issue links configurable issue link types.

This is how this looks in action:

Here, epics are connected to their initiatives via issue links of type is parent of / is child of. This would work for team-managed as well as company-managed projects.

Any questions just let me know!