Project Issue Hierarchy - Best Practice

[Malcolm McDonald]

I am a self-taught Jira project admin (no expert) for my marketing execution team in a large Jira enterprise managed environment. We have been very successful in using Jira to capture requests, assign work and track time. Our project work varies between a few days to a couple of weeks and so I am using a Story issue to capture those requests. I then have automated adding sub-tasks for each performer role supporting the project. This breakout has been great for dashboards and rich filter reporting.

My question is that after 2 years running this work and about 15k issues... the Jira admins are now recommending a different hierarchy for my work. Shifting performers from the sub-task to the story level. Outside of the headache of updating my historical data... I wanted to reach out and see if there is a standard that I should be following for my project scenarios. Thank you.

[Stephen_Lugton · Accepted solution]

Hi @Malcolm McDonald 

Take a look at https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Jira-articles/Jira-Issue-Type-Hierarchy-Everything-You-Need-to-Know-Jira-Guru/ba-p/2803255 which may help give you an understanding how some other people set up their hierarchies

[Malcolm McDonald]

Excellent. ty!

[bduncan]

If you have been successful - why change?

Your approach sounds like an ideal way to use stories and sub-tasks. Where the story represents the outcome for the user. And the sub-task is the units of work done by the performers. Relocating this to the top level will shift your narrative to outputs of a performer rather than the outcome of their collective work.

What is it that the administrators are trying to accomplish?

[Malcolm McDonald]

Thanks and I think the issue is that I would like to get a calculated field similar to Story Points to measure complexity at a performer level to understand individual workloads. I do not think having Story Point field at the sub-task level and so am not pressing for that. That should stay at the Story (parent) level... but I am trying to justify adding a complexity point field at the subtask level that can be calculated in my workloads dashboard. So, I am wondering if it is there fear on how I am using complexity scores (psuedo Story points) that is causing the most resistance.

In the schema that I am using.. there are no calculated fields for me to repurpose. If there was I would have my workaround. So that is my challenge to see if I can get one to move away from an hours based workload management metric to a complexity one at a performer level.