Best Way to Set up 5 Level Hierarchy for Program Management

[Sharif Omar]

Our team has mapped out deliverables for our Program which contain 5 levels:

Level 0 being the highest level similar to Business Capabilities.

Level 1 next level down from Level 0

Level 2 next level down from Level 1

Level 3 can be covered by existing Features / Epics functionality in JIRA

Level 4 can be covered by existing Stories within the Epics functionality in JIRA

What will be the best way to set this up so that all tracking and rolling up of data for management and reporting can take place in JIRA?

Delivery tracking of Levels 3 and 4 (Epics and Stories) in sprints and releases.

Roll up and reporting on Levels 0 - 3. 

Looking for suggestions please with standard JIRA cloud functionality or addons / apps that can help.

Thanks very much. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

You could try to construct something in Jira that looks like layers above Epic for layers 0, 1 and 2, but it's not a small task to do it yourself.

As it sounds very much like you are using a Scaled Agile model here, I would be looking at one of the tools that do those layers (and, yes, Jira "Epics" have the wrong name for SAFe, they should be features - Atlassian are trying to making them safely re-nameable as such)

The obvious one is Jira Align - models SAFe really well, providing all three of your layers with all the support you need.  It's also perfectly capable of other Agile-at-scale methodologies.  But you do need to be big to make it worth it.

Other options for Jira would be

• The Easy Agile suite (you may only want parts of it)
• Structure
• BigPicture

[Stephen Addis]

Suggest if you need 5, put in 9 ... skip a number so if you ever have to add one in, you have space without needing to rename everything else ... image if you needed to slip in a new one at position 2.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

The numbers in this question are purely for explaining an order in this question. 

The software, nor the process framework, use numbers at all.  Sharif would not need to leave gaps in sequences, the software doesn't work that way.