Can I display epics shared across projects in a single view?

[JoDee Fields]

Our Epics generally represent systems (aka SFDC), but we have projects for each team (Admins, Devs, Data, etc).   How can I get a single view that shows me all of the SFDC Epic assigned across multiple projects?  The goal is to see what the various teams are working on in the system at the same time. 

[Dmitry Astapkovich _Colined_]

Hello @JoDee Fields,

We are developers of Pivot Report for Jira, it allows you to create reports for multiple projects and multiple epics out of the box. Below are screenshots from a demo multi project report: 

You can pivot this data as you wish, e.g. using Epic Links:

You can play with it on your own here.  Or we can schedule a call to go over the app if needed. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @JoDee Fields 

Welcome to the community.

Do you have a single Epic issue defined in some project, and then child issues in that Epic where the child issues are in different projects owned by each team? Or does each team create their own Epic issue in their own project?

How do you know that the Epic is shared?

What type of view are you trying to display? An agile board showing all the child issues in the Epic? A dashboard report of some sort?

You should be able to retrieve all the issues in the Epic by creating a filter thus:

"Epic Link" = <Epic Issue Key>

You will have to have Browse Project permissions in all the projects where there are child issues in order to see those child issues.

[JoDee Fields]

As of now, each team is creating their own Epic with the exact same name.  A real example is an Epic named "ChiliPiper."  We have devs working on the integration at the same time the data team is working on reporting.  I would love to be able to click on the "chilipiper" epic in a single view and see all of the issues being worked across several boards that individually track Epics with that name

[Trudy Claspill]

Are the teams using Company Managed projects or Team Managed projects?

If each team is creating their own Epic in their own project, you will have to construct a filter that will collect the child issues for each such epic. That is going to be difficult with native Jira functionality as it doesn't have a built in method to get all the children of multiple Epics just based on those Epics having the same name.

If your teams are using Company Managed projects, you might want to consider instead having a single shared Epic issue created in another project. Each team would need to modify their board filters to include the Epics from that other project, and would need to know that they shouldn't close the Epics themselves as other teams might have open issues in those shared Epics.

You could then set up another board that shows those shared Epics and all their child issues across the various projects, and use that as a view into what is in the backlogs and what is currently in progress for the Epics.

That method won't work if your teams are using Team Managed projects, because Team Managed projects are intended to be "stand-alone" and can't include issues from other projects. 

Alternately if you have a Jira Premium subscription you could use Advanced Roadmaps to create an issue type to be a parent of Epics, and create such an issue which has all these replicated Epics as children. Then use the Advanced Roadmaps features to see the progress on the individual team Epics. If you don't have the Jira Premium subscription you can get the same sort of functionality from third party apps. 

[Trudy Claspill]

Just thought of another alternative, if your teams are using Company Managed projects.

You could set up another board based on a saved filter that covers all their projects. Then create swimlanes based on Queries, with a swimlane foe each duplicated Epic. For each swimlane add a query like

"Epic Link" in (<epic issue key 1>, <epic issue key 2>...)

...where the you would have to manually construct the list of Epic issue keys as a list of issue keys for all the same-named Epics across the teams' projects.

None of these options are exactly "easy". Process will have to be changed, and/or effort/money has to be put into options for generating the view you want.

[JoDee Fields]

I would like to buy an app if an app would make this easy - any specific suggestions? I would also be open to upgrading to Premium if a subset of users can upgrade (vs. the entire org).  How do get pricing details? Our account has been in place for a while now and we aren't sure who our POC is (or if we even had one). I am not sure if we are using company or team projects. 

[Trudy Claspill]

When looking at the agile board for the project, at the bottom of the navigation pane on the left it will say "You are in an ***-managed project". You would need to look at that for each project.

Atlassian has the concept of Organizations and Sites. If you were to upgrade to Premium, I believe you would be upgrading an entire Site, at a minimum, so the cost would be for all the licensed users of the Site. We don't have an Organization with multiple Sites, so I don't know how the subscriptions can vary in that case. Pricing for different subscription levels can be found here:

https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/pricing

I don't have any specific recommendations concerning apps. If you go to the Altassian Marketplace and search for roadmap apps for Jira Cloud that will give you a variety of choices.

Alternaely you could use an app that just extends JQL functionality to get all the children for Epics that meet a certain criteria.

JQL Search Extensions for Jira has a function called childrenOfEpicsInQuery that allows you to get the children of multiple Epics by defining a filter for the Epics themselves. I have not actually used that app.

Adaptavist Scriptrunner also has a similar function called issuesInEpics.