Caldulating Earliest Possible / Latest Required dates for Work Items

[Chris Morley]

I'm evaluating several project management systems for a client-facing business project which will run for the next threee years. I'm struggling with how to get Jira to calculate the Earliest Possible Start / Latest Required start dates for each Work Item based on the logic of the activities, dependencies and duration / remaining duration of each Work Item. What we used to call a Forward Pass through the plan to calculate the scheduled dates.

I would be grateful for advice on whether this is a built-in function.

[Staffan Redelius]

Hi @Chris Morley and welcome to the community!

Your tags indicate that you are on Jira Premium and that would mean that you have access to Jira Plans to be able to do cross-team planning.

In Jira plans you can schedule activities based on start- and completion date for several teams. If you have conflicting dates you will see a warning and you can also let Jira update the dates accordingly. You can also play around with different scenarios in your planning before you update the teams plans.

With that said it is quite complicated to do this type of planning and it always includes a large portion of unknowns regardless of what tool you choose. There are a lot of factors to consider when doing the planning i.e team capacity, uncertainty in estimates, hard/medium/soft dependencies but Jira plans will provide you with a good overview and planning capabilities but as always it always boils down to the quality of information you put in. 

Best regards,
/Staffan