No, not natively, on either of the two places people mean by “group by.” Jira boards’ Group By dropdown doesn’t offer Initiative — an Atlassian Community thread asking for exactly that is still unresolved. Advanced Roadmaps Plans’ Group By dropdown, per Atlassian’s own documentation, offers assignees, components, teams, sprints, releases, goals, and labels — no Status, no Initiative. And even where a view does support grouping, turning it on can quietly disable the hierarchy tree, depending on whether the project is team-managed or company-managed. This page checks each claim directly against Atlassian’s docs and Community threads, because “just group by it” is the top reply to this question and it doesn’t hold up.
The two Group By dropdowns, and neither has Status or Initiative
Boards. In “Group by Initiatives?” (949 views), Tracy Turley asks the plain question: “are there any plans to expand the Group By config on the boards to include Initiative?” A Community Champion suggests a JQL-plus-swimlanes workaround, and Tracy pushes back that Initiatives can live on a project a user can’t browse — the thread ends without a fix, just a workaround that doesn’t scale past one team.
Plans. Per Atlassian’s own support page on grouping an Advanced Roadmaps timeline, the complete list of what you can group a Plan by is: assignees, spaces, component, teams, sprints, release, goals, and labels — plus custom fields you’ve explicitly added to the plan, limited to single-select, multi-select, user-picker, and label field types. Status isn’t on that list, and neither is Initiative. It’s not an oversight buried in a menu somewhere; it’s the documented, complete set.
Status has its own open feature request confirming the gap directly: “In Advanced Roadmap Plan how do you group by status?” (581 views) got a reply from Marc -Devoteam- that filtering by status works fine, but grouping by it doesn’t — pointing at Advanced RoadMaps Group by Status, which is still open today: 20 votes, status “Gathering Interest,” unresolved.
Initiative “grouping” is usually the hierarchy, not the dropdown
The most common answer people get when they ask about grouping by Initiative is actually about a different feature: adding Initiative as a hierarchy level. In “Can I use group initiatives and initiatives in timeline view” (2,014 views — the highest-traffic thread on this page’s whole topic), a Community Champion answers that once Initiative is configured as a level above Epic in Advanced Roadmaps, “they’ll show up in the timeline and you can group or filter issues by them.” Read that carefully: what’s being described is Epics nesting under their Initiative parent in the hierarchy tree, a Premium feature configured once by an admin — not a value you pick from a Group By dropdown. An Atlassian Team member on the same thread confirms the standard Jira Software timeline, viewed from inside a single project, only shows Epic and the issues below it regardless — Initiatives don’t appear there at all without Advanced Roadmaps.
It’s an understandable mix-up, because the end result looks similar — issues visually clustered under an Initiative — but the mechanism and the limits are different. Hierarchy nesting requires a Premium admin to configure the level first, applies per work-item relationship rather than per arbitrary field, and (as the next section covers) doesn’t always survive alongside actual field-based grouping.
Even where grouping exists, it doesn’t reliably keep the hierarchy
This is the part that doesn’t show up until you actually try to combine the two features. In “Showing Hierarchy AND Grouping” (741 views), the reporter — on a team-managed project’s List view — found that “Show hierarchy is clearly disabled for Grouping and Filters.” Atlassian staff and a Community Champion both then reproduced the same combination working fine, but only on a company-managed project. Nobody in the thread reconciles why the same List view behaves differently by project type; the honest answer is that it just does, and it’s worth checking your own project type before assuming either result.
The same fragility isn’t confined to Status and Initiative. A 575-view thread, “How to group by projects on a Program Board”, got a definitive “No the Program board of the Plan can’t be viewed based by project” from a Community Champion, who explained why: Epics that span multiple projects would break their child items’ parent display if the board were grouped that way. That’s a structural pattern, not a missing checkbox — Jira’s grouping and its hierarchy display were built somewhat independently, and combining them safely is a genuinely harder problem than either feature alone.
Does the 2026 Summer Release change any of this? Checked — no
Jira’s 2026 Summer Release is real and it did touch both hierarchy and grouping, which makes it worth checking directly rather than assuming. Per Atlassian’s release blog and the Community announcement thread, the release merged the List and All Work views into one List view with a “Show Hierarchy” toggle, save-able custom views, and formula fields. None of that material — and none of Atlassian’s own Group By documentation — describes Status or Initiative being added as grouping options anywhere. The release made an existing hierarchy toggle easier to find; it left the underlying Group By field list, and the hierarchy-versus-grouping fragility above, untouched.
The honest summary
| What you want | Native Jira | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Group by Assignee, Component, Team, Sprint, Release, Goal, Label | Yes | Boards / Plans Group By |
| Group by a single-select, multi-select, user-picker, or label custom field | Yes | Plans Group By (after adding the field to the plan) |
| Group by Status | No | Open feature request (JSWSERVER-25003) |
| Group by Initiative, as a Group By field | No | Open feature request / unresolved thread |
| Initiative as a hierarchy level above Epic | Yes, Premium | Plans Timeline — not the Group By feature |
| Grouping shown together with the hierarchy tree | Inconsistent — works on company-managed, disabled on team-managed List view | List view |
What OneView does instead
OneView groups by Status, Assignee, Sprint, Project/Plan, Label, Due month, or Initiative — Initiative is a real rung in its own hierarchy model, read from whatever level Jira’s Advanced Roadmaps has actually configured, not a label standing in for one. And grouping composes with hierarchy instead of replacing it: a partition sits at its own rung, above the level it groups, so grouping Epics by Status doesn’t flatten or duplicate the Initiatives they sit under — it puts the grouping lane one level up and keeps every parent as context. Group by Status inside an Initiative view and you get Initiative › Status › Epic, not a flat list and not one Initiative repeated across every status lane.
The honest limit: OneView cannot group by Jira Priority or by your own custom fields. Its Priority field is Microsoft Planner’s own priority (Urgent, Important, Medium, Low) carried through unchanged — it isn’t wired to Jira issues’ Priority field at all. And the one custom-field slot it offers is a generic text field OneView itself stores, not a synced copy of whatever custom fields your Jira site has configured. If the field you need to group by is a Jira custom field or Jira Priority specifically, OneView doesn’t reach it today. Start a free trial to see your own Status and Initiative grouping laid out against real data.
Related reading
Grouping and hierarchy are two different Jira gaps that keep colliding, which is why this page kept having to separate them. If your actual question is about seeing Epic-over-Story structure at all — specifically on the Backlog, where only sub-tasks nest — see parent/child hierarchy in the Jira Backlog. And if what you’re after is adding an Initiative level in the first place, rather than grouping by one that already exists, a hierarchy level above Epic in Jira covers the Premium configuration path, its Plans-only visibility limit, and the Marketplace apps that build their own hierarchy layer instead. This page is about Advanced Roadmaps Plans specifically — a related but distinct surface is the Software Timeline, which lost (and, as of 2026-09-18, partly regained) its own Epic grouping under filters; see Jira Timeline lost Epic grouping for that separate, dated bug.