Agile teams may often struggle to understand how their day-to-day work rolls up to larger organizational work. A story that is assigned to a developer might support a feature that belongs to a capability, which ultimately delivers on a strategic epic. However, tracing that hierarchy typically requires navigating multiple screens or running reports.

The Hierarchy tab in Enterprise Agile Planning (EAP) provides a unified view of work items across all levels of your portfolio structure, from high-level epics down to individual stories. This hierarchical display of work updates dynamically based on your selected portfolio configuration, giving team members immediate visibility into how their work contributes to broader objectives.

When to use

The Hierarchy tab is valuable when you need to know the complete context of work items rather than viewing them in isolation. Consider using it in the following cases:

• Planning work and need to see what stories already exist under a feature before creating new ones.
• Reviewing progress at the portfolio level and to drill down into execution details.
• Onboarding team members who need to understand how their assigned work fits the bigger picture.

If you only need to track work items at a single level (for example, just stories for your sprint), the Backlog or Planning board views may be more efficient.

Benefits

For product owners

Quickly assess whether epics are broken down adequately, identify gaps in backlog refinement, and trace how customer requirements flow down through the hierarchy without switching between multiple views.

For scrum masters

Facilitate conversations about work that spans multiple agile teams and help team members see how their sprint commitments connect to release-level objectives.

For agile team members

Gain context for assigned work by seeing the parent feature and epic, get visibility into the business value behind technical tasks, and identify related stories that might affect their implementation approach.

Key capabilities

Multi-level hierarchy display

View work items across four portfolio levels: Portfolio, Solution Train, Agile Release Train (ART), and Agile Team, with each level displaying its default work item type such as Epics, Capabilities, Features, and Stories based on the configuration.

Context-sensitive navigation

When a team is selected, hierarchy view displays all the work that the selected team or its child teams contribute towards.

On-demand expansion

Child work items load only when you expand a parent item. This approach keeps the interface responsive, as you only retrieve the data you need.

Live hierarchy updates

When you create a work item, it appears in the hierarchy immediately. You don't need to refresh the page or leave the Hierarchy tab to confirm that your new item landed in the right place.

• A new top-level item appears alongside the existing top-level items for the selected portfolio configuration.
• A new child item appears under its parent when that parent is expanded in your current view.
• If the parent is collapsed or isn't loaded in your current view, the new item isn't displayed until you expand that parent.
• If a filter is active and the new item doesn't match the filter, the item isn't displayed in your current view. A confirmation message provides a link to open the new item directly.

Interactive filters

Filter the hierarchy by work item type using the Filters option. Filtering enables you to focus on the work items that you need and are relevant for you.

Note:

Your filter selections do not persist across sessions; you must reapply filters each time you access the hierarchy.

Personalized column display

Customize which columns appear in the hierarchy grid and adjust column widths to match your workflow. Your preferences persist across sessions, so you see your configured view each time you return. For more information, see Personalize column layout of Hierarchy in EAP.

Direct record access

Open any work item in a new browser tab using the context menu or by clicking the Name field hyperlink. This allows you to view or edit full record details without losing your place in the hierarchy.

Use cases

Release planning and dependency mapping

During Program Increment (PI) planning, release train engineers and product managers need to know how work flows across multiple agile teams. A common scenario: your organization is planning a major platform upgrade that requires coordinated changes across three agile teams.

Using the Hierarchy tab, the release manager can expand the epic to see all capabilities, then drill down to features assigned to each team. This visual mapping reveals which teams have dependencies on shared components, where hand-offs need to occur, and whether any critical path work lacks adequate story breakdown, all without leaving a single view or assembling data from multiple reports.

Impact assessment for scope changes

When stakeholders request changes to a feature mid-sprint, product owners need to quickly assess the downstream impact. For example, a customer escalation requires adding new acceptance criteria to a feature that is already in progress.

The product owner uses the Hierarchy tab to expand the affected feature and review all associated stories. They can immediately see which stories are in progress, which are complete, and which teams are involved. This visibility enables an informed conversation with stakeholders about the true cost of the change, whether it affects one story or ripples across multiple teams, before committing to revised scope.

Considerations

Initial load limits

For optimal performance, the hierarchy initially loads only the top 100 work items at each level, ordered by global rank. If your portfolio contains more than 100 top-level work items, use filters to narrow your view to the relevant subset.

If you want to change this default number, work with your admin to create a sn_apw_advanced.eap_hierarchy_items_limit system property. For more information, see Modify display limit in Hierarchy tab of EAP.

Enabling the Hierarchy view

The Hierarchy tab requires your admin to enable it through the sn_apw_advanced.enable_hierarchy_view system property. See Enable Hierarchy tab in EAP.

Form view fields and page load performance

When fields are added to the Hierarchy form view of a work item, all data for that work item type loads on page load. This data load occurs regardless of which columns are selected to display in the Hierarchy. Adding many fields to the form view may increase Hierarchy page load time. For more information, see Create or update form views for EAP work items.

Getting started

To access the Hierarchy tab, navigate to the EAP workspace and select your Agile team. The Hierarchy tab is available alongside the Backlog and Planning board tabs.