In my practice, I've always set up projects by creating a whole lot of epics, user stories, and tasks in JIRA before the real kickoff. All that lacked structure and a clear line of dependencies or really much hierarchy. Good luck presenting it to senior management also.

In a way, Calido is a nice mixture of functionalities that I had to manually replicate through Confluence and JIRA but now are integrated into a single app and one click away for all teams to access. Templates are a nice way of working and if you've been using excel for project management, you'll be happy to hear there is a csv import.