Backlog prioritization in Portfolio for JIRA

[ilya zarkhin]

I don't quite understand how backlog prioritization works in Portfolio. Let's say I have stories 1, 2 and 3 in epic ABC, stories 4 and 5 in epic DEF and story 6 in epic GHI.

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Is there a way to prioritize stories across epics? Let's say, I want to prioritize my stories in the following order: story 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 3? Seems like a pretty basic functionality, yet I can't figure out a way to do it. 

[Martin Suntinger · Accepted solution]

Portfolio currently focuses on epic-level prioritization, which means that there is indeed no way right now to shuffle the priorities of stories across different epics. 

The good news is that upcoming Portfolio Live Plans will address this, by allowing to switch to a flat list of stories and prioritize them across different parent epics (plus, the rank is in sync with priority order in Agile boards). Live Plans are currently available as a private beta (access infos and feedback is discussed via this LinkedIn group: https://www.linkedin.com/grp/home?gid=7018171) - it will soon switch to a publicly available LABS feature until eventually this new type of plan will be the new standard way of working as soon as they reach feature parity/superiority. 

[Steven F Behnke]

I think I understand.

The prioritization engine looks at Release Fix dates and Dependancies as well as Rank... I'm not certain we can achieve this with ranking alone in the current version of Portfolio since we aren't directly ranking Stories. The feature request for this is here – https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPO-294

I think ranking of stories needs to be taking place in Scrum Boards, but the fact of the matter is right now Portfolio Rank is disassociated from the Global Rank feature in JIRA. You can see the feature request for this here – https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPO-13

[ilya zarkhin]

There are no dependencies, just based on business priorities. It might not make sense in my limited data set, but what if I have over a hundred stories in multiple epics stretching across multiple release versions? Business wants to make sure certain stories from certain epics make it to a certain release version. Is there a way to do it by setting stories' priorities globally, regardless of epics? The reason I'm asking is that in Portfolio UI I can only see a way to prioritize epics and, then, stories within an epic.

[Steven F Behnke]

Are these dependancies? Why do you need to prioritize the specific order they happen in?