Features above or below Epics?

[Kevin Dickson]

Hi community,

I have a more generalized Agile question for you all -

Does anyone know of any Agile framework that uses Features above Epics?
Everywhere I read, and being an SPC myself, I can find no framework that does this, albeit that our Jira administrator insists that there are, and he has placed Features above Epics ..which as you can imagine is confusing everyone when it comes to PI Planning.

To me, all frameworks point to Initiatives->Epics->Features-> Stories...

I would sincerely appreciate feedback on this as I've been asked to put together a business case to get this amended to the correct hierarchy.

[Stephen_Lugton]

Hi @Kevin Dickson 

One of the issues here is your use of the term 'correct hierarchy', and I'm not having a go at you for saying that; in your experience that is the hierarchy that you are used to and which makes sense for you.  For others, like your Jira admin it may be different, especially since PI Planning etc. is part of the SAFe framework and unless you use SAFe you wouldn't know about it, and I don't know of many Agile frameworks that insist you use a certain hierarchy since that is kind of against the concept of being agile, in fact I'm more and more of the opinion that Epic is the wrong term and we should be calling it something like Deliverable.

At the end of the day it doesn't matter what hierarchies other frameworks may use, you should go with what works for you and your teams, and if the teams in your company all use SAFe then you can use that in your business case, otherwise you should get consensus from other teams over what works for everyone.

[Kevin Dickson]

Hi Stephan, and thank you for your reply.

I hope below makes things a little clearer for why I talk to a hierarchy.

If we take out the term "Agile framework" and apply business logic, then we would typically (and I say typically, not in every case) see the following hierarchy to delivery against the company's strategic vision.

• Company strategy
• Portfolio strategy (a specific portfolio within a company).
• Strategic vision (mapped to each portfolio)
• Initiatives (to delivery on the goals set by the strategic vision.)

...and now this is where the Agile framework sets in:

Our Initiatives sit at the top tier of our Jira Premium instance.
They describe all of the above and sit within the LPM Project category

The initiatives then get broken down into the following hierarchy:

• Epics (A large body of work that supports an initiative)
• Features (Align to an epic by breaking down a large business initiative into smaller, actionable components that deliver value incrementally.
• Stories, etc.

Typically Epics should drive strategic goals, while features and user stories enable execution

I've done deep dives into every framework out there, and each one of them suggests that Epics are followed by Features, i.e. Epics: > 1 quarter, Features are deliverables < 1 quarter.

So my question is simply, has anyone used Features above Epics, and if so, why?
It's not about going against the grain of Agile, it's about going against a framework-agnostic approach of business logic.

[Stephen_Lugton]

Thanks for expanding on that @Kevin Dickson it makes a lot of sense, I'm very much in favour of using what works, so although our general hierarchy is:

• Theme
• Initiative
• Epic
• Story | Task | Bug
• Sub-Task

We could easily change the names, after all they're only ways of grouping the work, in fact for our marketing team the hierarchy we use is:

• Portfolio
• Campaign | Event
• Task | Article | Email, Letter & Notification (ELN or Ellen)
• Task Breakdown

[Michael Yaroshefsky - Visor for Jira]

Hey @Kevin Dickson and welcome to Atlassian Community.

I think you're correct that there are no established frameworks that put features above epics.

Is it possible your admin has a different interpretation of what "feature" means, perhaps they're thinking more along the lines of a feature-set? If they think feature refers to something like a mobile app for a product, or a BI reporting suite, then I could see how a feature could encompass several epics, although, I agree it is unconventional!

Best,

Mike 

[Septa Cahyadiputra]

Hi @Kevin Dickson

I'm not sure if I understand your requirement correctly, it seems that you want to modify the issue hierarchy in Jira which is possible by configuring the issue hierarchy.

• Configure The Issue Hierarchy 

Is there specific use case that you have in mind? Do you have a screenshot of the issue and what you want to achieve maybe?

Hope it helps.

regards,
Septa Cahyadiputra

[Kevin Dickson]

Hi Septa,

I'm not looking at any specific use case.
Rather I'm just asking if anyone out there has used Features above Epics.
And if so, what was the reasoning .

Hope that makes more sense 👍