Advance Roadmap as simple project plan

[Bhumika Dave]

Hi,

I am planning to use ARM as a project planning tool for my project in Agile environment.

Some loopholes with the projects are,

1. Project has just initiated with clear cross-project dependencies and each project team is having either Scrum board or Kanban board.

2. Jira hygiene for all the projects are not really good. Having said that, we are still in planning phase and hence many of the tickets are not having Sprint, Size, Release, dependencies etc.

3. Backlog grooming and sprints have visibility up to maximum 1 or 2 sprints as it is project initiation phase. Hence, size are not known in advance too.

I want to use ARM functionalities gradually and start with basic project planning with mainly tracking dependencies and change in plan according to dependencies. i.e. If one of the projects changes the committed date, its dependent project date should change automatically.

At this point, Auto schedule looks quite overwhelming to me with 3 points I've mentioned above.

Can any one please suggest how can I start with my goal of simple project planning? What are the constraints/mandate with Auto scheduling features and how can I make sure it works well with my project?

Regards.

[Dave]

Hi @Bhumika Dave,

This is a great question. It sounds like each team has their own project, however I would definitely recommend making use of the "Team" field as assigning teams to issues will help unlock capacity planning and enable you to see sprints on the timeline.

If you have multiple teams working on a single project then I would recommend creating a board for each team using a custom JQL using the "Team" value to identify the work owned by each team.

As you have a mixture of Scrum and Kanban boards you will be limited to only use time based estimates in a plan. This might be a problem if some teams are using points rather than time based estimates.

You will be able to manage dependencies within a plan (and we're going to be rolling out some improvements to the UX for that in the near future) but I would definitely recommend making use of the Dependency Report view to help you visualise the dependencies between teams (try grouping by team to achieve this).

In the main plan tab I would recommend grouping by Team with the "Show capacity on timeline" option selected (you can do this via the View Settings menu).

Make sure that you share all the teams you create (this will make them visible on the issue details screen) and make sure you add that field to the screen configuration.

I would probably recommend not starting with auto-scheduling initially, but getting the plan set up so that you have a good understanding of your how everything relates together.

I'd also recommend creating additional hierarchy levels so that you can ladder up overarching work to a common objective.

Without having a deep knowledge of the projects that you're working with that it the best general advice I can offer, but please let me know if you have any specific questions on any of the above!

Regards,

Dave