Admin tips: Roadmaps help you plan smarter, communicate better, and release more predictably

March 16, 2021

Hi admins!

Roadmaps can help a team of any size visualize the whole picture, ladder work up to bigger goals, and map out dependencies. In addition, roadmaps allow you to:

Provide a clear and concise way to share what’s happening in real-time.
Effectively communicate target delivery dates and breadth of work required to get value into customers.

How do you use Roadmaps? Comment below!

8 comments

We use Advanced roadmaps. They are a bit of tricky but overall quite good.

Before Atlassian presented Roadmaps we used our own plugin that showed issues as a graph.

It is a pleasure to know that you moved in right direction when it was not clear where to go :)

Like • Dave likes this

Definitely, roadmaps provide an easy to understand view of projects.

But instead (in complement?) of creating these views based on EPICs, we would find it more realistic to base them on releases/versions, which are closer to what we live in...

Not very useful for our team.

Reason:
The main work items in a roadmap are epics.

But unlike 'parent + subtasks' which track cumulative time stats (original estimate, remaining, logged) epics don't collect that data, thus not showing any data related to actual time/calendar dates. You cant see if the task went outside the original estimate and the release date sliped.

Oh, and roadmap ignore dependency links between tasks within a single epic. Let's say one is blocked by another, I cant see that connection on 'roadmaps'. All you can do, just link waterfall-style those big epic chunks.

Maybe am I missing some settings?

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Would love to use the roadmap functionality but they are a lot of effort to maintain being nearly all manual. There is plenty of data already in the system that they can use to make the roadmap far more effective and useful to product managers.

It would be good if each epic could be sized based on the sum of story points against the average project velocity. If two projects were running concurrently assume an even split during those sprints.

It ought to also show vertical guidelines aligned to the sprints of the project as nearly all time units discussed are sprints.

Thanks for sharing these tips @Bridget !

I would like to know more on how can we create Roadmaps in JIRA. Never tried yet this feature of JIRA. Is there any reference articles or videos can suggest to start with. Really my team need to track dependencies in a better way and like to see in whole picture

Hi @Manu Somasekharan Nair

We have some great documentation around How to get started with Advanced Roadmaps. Also we have this short video that shows you How to create your first plan in Advanced Roadmaps.

Jessica

Like • Dave likes this

Hi @Sergei Gridnevskii,

I'm on the Advanced Roadmaps team... we'd love to here more about the parts of Advanced Roadmaps that you found tricky, you can provide us with feedback via the "Give feedback" button at the top of a plan, our team does best it can to reply to all customer feedback.

Regards,

Dave