How to create a cross-project timeline in Jira (in 5 minutes)

Share on socials

How to create a cross-project timeline in Jira (in 5 minutes)

Georges Petrequin

Published on 30 January 2026

14 min read

An illustration of a Jira board with a cross-project timeline overlaid on top

Georges Petrequin

Published on 30 January 2026

14 min read

Jump to section

What you actually need to see across your projects

Three workarounds to get a cross-project timeline in Jira

Setting up cross-project Jira timeline in under five minutes

1. Start with JQL to pull in multiple projects

2. Switch to the cross-project timeline

3. Adjust plans without context-switching

4. Spot problems before they surprise you

5. Make important work stand out

6. Track your project drift with baselines

7. Customise, save, and share your timeline

Stop switching between Jira boards to piece together your portfolio view. Learn how to build a cross-project timeline in just a few minutes, no Premium upgrade or DIY workarounds required!

Jira's built-in timeline has a frustrating limitation: it only shows one project at a time.

If you're a portfolio manager, delivery lead, or program manager responsible for work spanning multiple teams, that means your morning routine looks something like this: open one board, check statuses, open another, cross-reference dates, open a third, try to remember what you saw in the first one. By the time you've stitched together a rough picture, you've burned through your focus for the day.

Atlassian's solution is Jira Plans, but that requires a Premium licence. For a 300-person org, you're looking at roughly $50,000 per year. That's a lot to pay for extra visibility.

Thankfully, there's a faster, more affordable option. Here's how to set up a cross-project timeline in under five minutes using our Jira Cloud app, Hierarchy for Jira.

What you actually need to see across your projects

When you're responsible for delivery across multiple ambitious projects, your success depends on seeing the full picture:

Are we going to hit the project delivery date?
Where are risks building up?
What's blocking the API team?
If we delay our new integration, what else is affected?

Jira shows you a lot of this information, but there's a catch you'll already know about: the built-in timeline only shows a single project with a fixed epic, story, subtask structure.

If you need to see initiatives spanning multiple teams, or understand how a delay in Project A ripples into Project B, you're left switching between boards and stitching the bigger picture together yourself.

Three workarounds for getting cross-project timeline visibility (and why they fall short)

Most teams eventually look for a solution, and the options typically fall into these three categories:

1. Upgrade to Jira Premium

Yes, you can get a cross-project timeline that reflects your larger portfolio of projects in Jira. But, Atlassian's cross-project roadmap feature is part of Jira Plans, which requires a Premium or Enterprise licence.

The timeline view in Jira Plans

For 300 users, that's roughly $50,000 per year. About ten times what you'd pay for a marketplace app that solves the same problem.

Premium does unlock other useful features, but if timeline visibility is your main gap, you're paying enterprise prices for a single capability.

2. Build something yourself

You could export your project data to Excel, build a dashboard, or write scripts to pull data from multiple projects into a single view.

It works... Until someone forgets to update the spreadsheet, or you rename a Jira field and three reports stop working. Then, your source of truth becomes a source of confusion, and you're back where you started.

It's a valid option if you're budget-constrained, but we wouldn't recommend the DIY route as it usually leads to problems down the line.

3. Request screenshots and status updates

You could go the manual route: ask team members to screenshot their Jira boards or message you with key updates. Then, paste everything into a slide deck, and you've got something to present.

But, that presentation is only going to be accurate for a moment. By the time you're presenting, it's already outdated. And this approach creates friction: multiple people have to stop what they're doing to report on data that already exists in Jira, and meanwhile, your stakeholders are waiting for information that could (and should) be self-serve.

None of these three workarounds really give you what you need: a live, unified timeline that looks at your existing Jira data, tells you what's happening across your projects, and doesn't require hours of maintenance every week.

How to set up your cross-project timelines in under five minutes with Hierarchy for Jira

If you haven't tried it before, Hierarchy for Jira is a Jira Cloud app (also available on Atlassian Government Cloud) that lets you build custom work type hierarchies beyond Jira's default epic, story, and subtask structure.

The app shows you how all your work connects in a nested tree view with custom levels above and below epics, and then, you can switch to the timeline view to plan and track work on a Gantt-style view (more on this to follow, so keep reading!).

You can try Hierarchy for Jira with a completely free 30-day trial, so you can install it and follow along with the rest of this guide!

Once you've opened Hierarchy for Jira, you're just a few simple steps away from a live cross-project timeline: write a JQL query to pull in your projects, click the timeline view, and adjust your date fields if needed.

No scripting, no lengthy onboarding process, and no waiting on IT or finance to get you access to all of Jira Plans' functionality.

Let's walk through the process:

1. Start with JQL to pull in multiple projects

Once you've installed the app from the Atlassian Marketplace (try it with the 30-day free trial), open it from your apps sidebar.

Straight away, you'll see your projects unfold in a nested tree view, showing you how every work item connects beyond the native epic, story, subtask links you've already created. Your tree view will surface every connection, from your large initiatives down to your individual tasks.

There are plenty of benefits of the custom work type hierarchy, but we won't get into them here. To learn more about the custom hierarchy, read some of our articles on using the tree view, managing dependencies, or dive into the details in the docs.

Hierarchy for Jira lets you create quick filters, based on JQL, which allow you to quickly surface the work items and projects you need.

Use JQL to pull any project into your view

For example, if we wanted to pull in three projects (platform, mobile, and API), we'd use this JQL filter:

'project IN (PLAT, MOBILE, API)'

From there, you can then layer on quick filters for work item types, assignee, status, or whatever else you need. Hierarchy for Jira reads the parent-child and existing linked work items, then brings everything together into a tree view.

Now, here's where things get interesting:

2. Switch to the cross-project timeline

Click the 'Timeline' toggle on the top-right of the app, and you'll immediately see your work items transform into a Gantt-style timeline.

Want to see the timeline in more detail? Just click on any image in this article to enlarge.

Hierarchy for Jira's Gantt style timeline view showing multiple projects in one place

Hierarchy for Jira's timeline showing multiple projects in one view

Work items appear as bars positioned by their dates, so you can answer 'will we make it?' at a glance instead of mentally stitching together status updates. You can then switch between weekly, monthly, or quarterly views depending on whether you're planning a sprint or preparing for your monthly portfolio review.

One thing worth mentioning: in your timeline settings, you can specify which date fields drive your timeline. Not every team uses 'Start Date' and 'Due Date', so whether you use 'Target Start', 'Target End', or something custom to plan your work, your timeline will always reflect your team's reality.

You can adjust your JQL queries to pull in as many projects as you need, and that's it: you've got a cross-project timeline view without Jira Plans, without exporting to spreadsheets and wrangling with charts, and without a multi-month setup process!

3. Adjust plans without context-switching

When plans change (and they always do), just drag either end of any timeline bar to reschedule. The underlying Jira work item updates automatically, and you don't need to spend time opening items in new tabs, hunting for date fields, and repeating the process twelve times.

Drag and drop your timeline bars to adjust work item due dates

Drag your timeline bars to instantly reschedule dates

When you're replanning after a scope change, this can be the difference between five minutes and an hour.

As well as that, you can hover over any bar to see key details (title, status, dates, duration, or custom fields) without clicking through. Perfect for when you need to gather context quickly before a meeting.

4. Spot problems before they surprise you with dependency lines

You may have already noticed these when you first opened your timeline view. Dependency lines automatically connect your work items, and when a scheduling conflict occurs, the line turns red.

Dependency line showing on on Hierarchy for Jira's cross-project timeline

See every task dependency marked with connecting lines

If the API team is set to finish on the 15th but the Mobile team needs that work done by the 10th, you'll spot the five-day gap instantly.

That's a lot better than discovering the conflict when someone asks, 'Why are we slipping?' in next week's standup, or worse, having a senior stakeholder point out a risk you should have flagged.

5. Make your important work and dates stand out

Not every task matters equally to your stakeholders, so there are a couple of ways to highlight which ones do in your cross-project timeline.

Milestones let you turn key deliverables into diamond markers on the timeline, so release dates and external commitments don't get lost in the noise.

Use diamond marker milestones to align your team around key dates

These make it easy to align your whole team around key dates, so no one's ever surprised or wondering why your key project due dates are set up as they are.

You can then make individual work items stand out even more with critical scope highlighting.

This lets you flag work that needs to be completed before your release is ready. Select which priority levels matter in your timeline settings, and any matching work items will stand out with a red glow.

Use critical scope in Hierarchy for Jira to flag must-complete work items

Use critical scope to highlight must-complete work items with a red glow

When your exec wants you to give them a heads up if there's likely to be any delays or risks to delivery, the answer's already visible.

6. Track your project drift with baselines

Ever had a stakeholder ask a simple question like 'Why are we behind our planned schedule?' and found yourself digging through Slack, Jira notifications, and opening multiple work items, just to piece together an answer?

Baselines on your timeline can help you solve that. Once you enable baselines in your timeline settings, a grey bar appears beneath each timeline bar, showing how your original plan compares to where you are now.

Enable baselines in Hierarchy for Jira to track drift

Use baselines in Hierarchy for Jira to track your project drift

Once you see a work item drifting beyond your initially planned date, you can proactively investigate the reasons.

Instead of explaining project drift in abstract terms, you can show exactly when and where the schedule shifted, making it easy to have a real conversation with your team about what to do next.

7. Customise, save, and share your timeline views

Once you've built a view of your timeline (or custom hierarchy view) with the right JQL queries, filters, and columns in place, you can save it.

Save your cross-project timeline to refer back to later!

Then, you can share a URL to that live view or embed it in Confluence.

That's it! Your stakeholders can check progress whenever they want. No Slack pings, no 'quick question' interruptions, no slide decks that are outdated before you present them.

You've just given yourself back the time you used to spend gathering and reformatting information that already existed in Jira.

If you want to add your timeline to a deck, just choose the 'Export to PNG' option.

Export a snapshot of your timeline to use in your next presentation

You can choose your timeline date range, start and end dates, then hit 'Export'. Just like that, your whole timeline is ready to share!

No complex setup, no matter the Jira plan you're on

Here's some more good news: the timeline view is included in your existing Hierarchy for Jira licence. There's no separate app to install and no multi-month implementation project.

All you need to do is find the timeline tab, and your cross-project timeline is automatically created! Any changes in the timeline automatically update your Jira work items, and vice versa. Your team doesn't need to learn a new tool or maintain a parallel system.

If you're on Jira Standard and looking to avoid the jump to Premium, this gives you cross-project visibility without the price tag. And if you're already on Premium or Enterprise, the timeline in Hierarchy for Jira will add a faster, more flexible cross-project timeline to your instance.

Ready to see your Jira projects clearly?

Managing delivery across multiple teams shouldn't mean juggling browser tabs, exporting to spreadsheets, or sitting through endless status meetings just to piece together a picture that already exists in your Jira data.

With Hierarchy for Jira's cross-project timeline, you pull everything into one view, see how work connects, and spot problems before they derail your deadlines. Your stakeholders get a live link instead of a stale slide deck, and you get your valuable time back to focus on helping your team hit their milestones.

Already using Hierarchy for Jira? The cross-project timeline view is live and ready to use! Just click the 'Timeline' toggle on the top-right of your board and watch it appear!

Haven't tried Hierarchy for Jira yet? Start a free 30-day trial to see how cross-project timelines can transform your project visibility.

Ready to get started?

Hi, I'm Jay, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Hierarchy for Jira. If you'd like to try the cross-project timeline, then you start a free 30-day trial of the app on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Prefer a quick tour first? Book a walkthrough with our team, and we'll help you set it up for your workflow!

Try the app Book your demo

Meet Hierarchy for Jira's new cross-project timeline view!

an illustrated jira board with connected tasks and a tree view overlaid on top

5 March 2025

The busy Project Manager's guide to managing task dependencies in Jira

An illustrated Jira board with a custom hierarchy overlaid on top

14 May 2025

How Forty8Fifty Labs builds a SAFe issue hierarchy

Written by

Georges Petrequin

Content Marketing Manager

Georges is a Content Marketing Manager at Upscale with a focus on our Jira apps. He spends his time crafting content that helps our customers solve their everyday work pain points and get more out of their Atlassian tools.