Advanced Roadmaps - Rolling Dates up to Project Level

[Nikki Hylton]

Good afternoon,

We are trying to get a visual timeline of all of our related projects using Advanced Roadmaps.  

We created Epics for each milestone of a project, and tied the related tasks to those epic milestones. The dates roll up nicely for these.

However, we also want to be able to roll up dates to the overall project level - not just underlying milestones. 

Anyone have any ideas or success with this? 

Here's a sample of what we're looking for: 

Thanks in advance,

Nikki

[Walter Buggenhout · Accepted solution]

Hi @Nikki Hylton and welcome to the Community!

Dates only roll up to issues higher up in the hierarchy. In your screenshot, projects are Jira projects used for grouping and not issues defined in your issue hierarchy. That is why there is no rollup there.

If you ungroup the view and connect your Epics to e.g. Initiative issues that represent the same projects, you will be able to see the rollup.

Hope this helps!

[Nikki Hylton]

Hi Walter, 

Thanks so much for your response! I did try creating an "overall project" epic, and making that the parent of each of the underlying epics but it appears an epic can't have a parent. What do you mean by initiative issues? Would that be something that could be the parent of the underlying epics for each milestone, to show the overall project timeline? It's my understanding each issue can only have one parent, but I'm pretty new to Jira :)

Thanks again so much,

Nikki

[Nikki Hylton]

Also open to any and all ideas, even starting from scratch if the path we're on isn't feasible. The general objective is to be able to generate a visual of all of our ongoing projects and related timelines (by phases/milestones and overall project), in an automated way (since the project tasks and related dates are all managed in Jira, we could just download a visual at any given time without having to manually adjust or create anything new.) We don't want to have to use an outside tool where we would have to manually adjust dates that have changed in Jira, if that makes sense. 

I would think the advanced roadmap could accomplish this, but stuck on the project level timeline. 

Thanks again,

Nikki

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Nikki Hylton,

With Advanced Roadmaps you can extend your issue hierarchy. That is pretty basic stuff, so I was assuming you were aware of that - my apologies 😅

The most commonly used approach would be to create a specific issue type (e.g. initiative, project, ... anything that makes sense in your organisation). Most commonly, you would then set up a separate Jira project where you would only create issues of that specific issue type. That becomes your project catalog if you like. You can even implement a tailored workflow there to represent your project lifecycle from idea to closure if you like. But in the end, it is those issues that will be added to the hierarchy above the epic level through Advanced Roadmaps hierarchy configuration.

Maybe some useful links:

• Managing issue types 
• Introduction to issue type schemes 
• Managing issue type schemes 
• Associating issue types with projects 
• Custom hierarchy levels in advanced roadmaps  

[Nikki Hylton]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout 

Thank you so much. It looks like this will be a great solution for us. Thanks also for providing the reference links, greatly appreciated.

Many, many thanks!

Nikki