Using Jira Plans (formally - portfolio) - how to manage baselines

Question

Hi,

We are using plans to magage cross PI (long term planning) progress.

We can add Epics, see progress of them and so on.

How can we copmpare Plans to the Plan Baseline?

How can I capture baselines for a plan?

For now we have "scenarios" capability in plan - which does not intent to do this capability?

For example - a use case:

I originally planned 5 epics - all for PI1.

Now I have 8 epics at the plan - som were added , maybe deleted , changed the FixVersion data and so on.

How can I easylly compare curent and original plan?

Yaron Norani · Answer

Thanks!

I will implement and report back if I found some good best practice.

I realy want to try to visualize the "spit over" data - so we will be able to show eailly that the epic moved (delayed).

Of cource for a single one it is easy, just look at the specific issue.

For the higher overview - maybe a Dashboard / Confluence page as suggested,  that will show all epics with their FixVersion data (one or multiple values).

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Yaron Norani,

In advanced roadmaps you will indeed see issues in 1 fix version. And that should be the case, since it is a planning tool and the only thing you want to know is in what version (or PI) you will deliver it in.

While there is no out of the box report (afaik) to display what issues were added / removed to a version, Jira does track changes to the field. And fixversion does support history search. That means you can track what version an issue has been in even if it isn't anymore today. e.g. if you want to find out what Epics were in PI2022Q4 and are no longer there at the end, this filter should give you that information:

fixversion WAS PI2022Q4 AND fixversion != PI2022Q4

As a last remark: in my experience working with many different organisations, managers do want to know what decisions were made and why. Rarely does this mean they want to know what the original plan was. To mitigate that, it is a good idea to keep a record of those decisions. And instead of trying to pull all those details from historical Jira reports, rather document your decisions (with a clear definition of why they were taken) in a documentation tool like Confluence. They are much easier to find afterwards if you need them and use plain language instead of reports that still need interpretation. For key decisions in the course of a project that works much better towards a management layer. As a bonus, you can use a Jira macro to refer to the issues that were impacted by your decision. That way, you can tie everything nicely together.

Yaron Norani · Answer

Hi @Walter Buggenhout  and thanks for the quick reply.

I will need an option to know whether we moved an epic to other PI, added new and so on.

I agree with you that we need to plan from that point forward and do the best to be on track.

From the other hand, managers usually would like to know:

What was changes?
What was the original plan?

One thing I thought is that we add additional value to the FixVersion field, when the issue spilled over.

For example - Epic planned to be handled in PI1 and was delayed, It will have additional value for PI2.

This can be a good (maybe enough) information.

I tried to visualize it on Plans, but I found that it shows only ONE value for FixVersion, even if the issue contains multiple.

Is it configurable ? (I did not find a way).