Jira projects, initiatives, epics, stories, tasks, and subtasks

Most Jira projects are configured to use epics, stories, tasks and subtasks to organize work within the projects. Atlassian has recently also introduced initiatives but you can think of them as a hierarchy that allows you to go from a higher level goal down to each very specific subtask needed to accomplish that goal.

Initiatives are high level strategic goals for your organization that many different teams and projects might work to meet. Initiatives are only available in the Advanced planning (formerly known as Advanced roadmaps) feature of Atlassian which is currently available to us as part of our premium subscription for Jira Software. Our recommendation is that senior level leadership request a JS license and project to define initiatives that their organization can link their work back to. Atlassian is continuously changing the way the name and package that functionality so check for updates. Senior leadership can create a JS Top level planning project that contains the initiatives to guide the work performed by their organizations. Individual project managers can create and tie epics in their projects back to the initiatives in the top level planning project.

Epics are the next largest construct available and can either be used in the same way as initiatives since they can be linked across projects or they can be used as the top level construct within a specific project. Multiple epics across projects can tie back to higher level initiatives and they can summarize multiple stories and tasks. Project managers are usually responsible for ensuring that the epics are being met and reporting status at that epic level.

Stories stem from the concept of a user story and are the next largest construct under epics. Because they are meant to represent a user facing feature or capability they are most often used by and reserved for application development. However, they can also be used to provide an additional level of granularity for breaking up work since multiple tasks and then subtasks can be tied back to a single story. We recommend only using stories if you are developing user facing capabilities that require user stories otherwise people might find it confusing. If you do not need the additional granularity keep things simple for your teams and just use tasks and subtasks.

Tasks represent specific work that needs to be done in order to meet higher level stories, epics, and initiatives. This is the level of work that is usually assigned to a specific individual and/or team and ideally can be completed within a few days by a specific individual. If there is a task that takes more than a few days or takes multiple people to complete it, then consider splitting that task up into subtasks which are the smallest level of granularity available within the Jira product line.

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Here are some links to Atlassian explanations and references to their hierarchy of issue types but be warned that these evolve frequently and they are not always great about cleaning up outdated documentation.

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics-stories-themes

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/epics

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/user-stories

Advanced planning is a set of capabilities offered within a feature called Plans.

Plans enables teams of teams to plan and track cross-functional work, such as a program or initiative. Within a plan, you can schedule work, allocate capacity, map dependencies, and model different scenarios, all within a single source of truth.

Plans pulls data from boards, projects, and filters in Jira to visualize work in a customizable interface. Functioning as a sandbox environment, you can plan and experiment before updating your original data in Jira.