How can I link Tasks directly to Initiatives?

[Douglas Clendening]

Our company uses Initiatives from the portfolio addon (and even higher ones) for high level ideas or goals. Most often, there is an epic sized piece of work that fits under the initiatives and its tasks for completion fall in line.

However, sometimes there are smaller tasks one person needs to complete which doesn't really flow up through an epic sized piece of work but is tied to an initiative. In that case, we have no way to properly link it up to the initiative.

How do I allow this one to many hierarchy relationship in my settings? I've seen that we could use links and build a structure in a specific way to get this view, but that is much too confusing to our employees (using links sometimes but epic link/parent link most of the time).

Help! This is also required for OKRs - KRs (an issuetype above an epic in hierarchy) don't always have an epic size of work under it but does have tasks that need to tie back to it.

[Dave Liao · Accepted solution]

In principle, having an orphaned Task map directly to an Initiative means there's an intermediate Epic that hasn't been defined:

• The quick way out? Create a catch-all Epic.
• The better solution (where possible) is to spend a little time to see what kind of Epic can be created to catch these Tasks.

Either way will help you get your OKRs mapped to your Tasks properly. Good luck!