Help Setting Up a Plan with a Critical Roadmap to Identify Delays on Launch Date

Andres Zamudio

Hello everyone:

I'm trying to set up a Jira plan to manage the launch of different products, and I would love to have your input on how to show a critical path to visualize when the delay of certain issues, whether when they are set to off track or when there is no status change after the due date, impacts the launch date of a product.

1. Is there a native tool in Jira that can show the critical path? Maybe using the advanced roadmaps. If not, do you happen to know of any other alternatives?

Any tips, recommendations, or insights from your experience would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your assistance!

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @Andres Zamudio and welcome to the Community!

No, there is no native tool in Jira to show a critical path. Jira was built as a tool to support agile ways of working, and critical paths have their origin in traditional styles of project management.

If you think about tools and critical path, you end up with traditional gantt charts. The Atlassian Marketplace literally offers dozens of Gantt charting apps that may help you bridge the gap if you need to.

That last bit of the previous sentence is quite important. All Jira products offer timelines that offer a visual representation of your schedule as well as tools that help you plan work in increments (or sprints) through scrum boards, on a continuous basis through kanban boards and on calendars (in JSW or JSM). In JSW Premium, advanced roadmaps allows you to make such timelines  across multiple projects and with an extended issue hierarchy. That tool has a built-in warning system if your schedule runs off track.

So, plenty of options. It's important to look at your process first, though. A critical path essentially highlights key milestones or deliverables in your project that you want to keep an eye on when they tend to go off track. And yes, you can use a traditional gantt chart tool to track these, or you can identify and monitor them in many other ways as well.

Hope this helps!