Advanced planning in Jira Software Premium: What’s new and what’s next

[#1]

📣 Fellow power planners: we’re excited to share the latest and greatest features in Jira Software Premium designed to help you plan and track cross-functional work with ease. Whether you’re on a free Premium trial or your teams are already humming along in Premium, check out the new and upcoming features below to learn how you can improve visibility and collaboration across your organization.

What’s new

🆕 Create a high-level plan with Top-level planning template

The Top-level planning template provides a high-level overview for planning and tracking work across multiple teams and projects. It comes preconfigured with a new hierarchy level above Epic, allowing you to visually connect related projects and break down larger bodies of work in a plan.

Learn more about Top-level planning template

🆕 Bring Team-Managed projects into Plans

To better support cross-team collaboration and different ways of working, Plans now supports both team-managed and company-managed projects. Bring all your projects, including business projects from Jira Work Management, into a shared plan in Jira Software Premium to plan and track cross-functional work.

Webinar: How Lumen collaborates on cross-functional work in Jira

Check the latest in Jira Work Management Premium

🆕 View your plan in a table format with List mode

You can now view the issues in your plan as a list and toggle between Timeline and List mode as you schedule and track work. This allows you to easily access all the issue details you need without switching context and without sacrificing space in Timeline mode.

Learn more about List Mode in Plans

🆕 Avoid potential blockers with new dependencies report enhancements

The key to a creating a reliable, robust plan is knowing your dependencies. Our latest enhancements to the dependencies report in Plans allows you to group and filter your dependencies, and embed the results on a Confluence page to easily communicate potential blockers.

Learn more about dependencies report in Plans

🆕 Select which changes are saved to your plan

Got multiple planners scheduling work and making updates? Now you can select which changes are saved to your plan and prevent premature or unintended updates.

Learn more about saving changes in Plans

🆕 Quickly locate any issue in your plan

If your plan contains thousands of issues, it can be difficult to pinpoint a specific issue on the timeline view. Now you can search for any issue within your plan using “Find your issue” under Plan settings.

Learn how to find an issue in a plan

🆕 Easily onboard your teams with a sample plan

Plans is designed to be a shared space for multiple teams. To help teams get familiar with Plans, we’ve made the option to create a sample plan available to all users so anyone can safely explore and learn its capabilities.

Learn how to create a sample plan

What’s next

⏭️ Advanced Roadmaps will soon just be called Plans!

Previously, our advanced planning feature in Jira Software Premium went by two names: Advanced Roadmaps and Plans. You may have wondered: “Are these the same thing?”

Yes, Advanced Roadmaps and Plans are the same thing! To create a more consistent experience, we’re just calling it Plans moving forward. Plans is an advanced planning feature in Jira Software Premium; it is where cross-functional work is broken down and tracked according to timeline, dependencies, and capacity.

In the coming months, you will notice the Advanced Roadmaps name updated across Jira Software product, documentation, and other resources. This update will not impact existing functionality in Jira Software Premium. Plans will remain accessible through the top navigation and will still provide all the powerful capabilities teams know and rely on today!

⏭️ Assign work to Atlassian teams in Plans

Atlassian teams will soon be enabled in Plans, making it easier to plan, assign, and track work across any team set up in your directory on the Atlassian platform.

⏭️ New Parent field is coming to Jira Software

To support the flexible and SaFe compatible naming of the Epic level, a new Parent field is replacing the existing Epic link and Parent link fields to provide a more consistent experience across both company and team-managed projects.

Learn how to get early access

[Judah]

@Carol Jang - Any idea if/when these changes will hit Data Center instances? 

[jacob.nielsen]

@Carol Jang Is there an ETA on "⏭️ New Parent field is coming to Jira Software"? Would love to get my hands on it. :)

Everythin' else is cool and all, but having a unified Parent/Child hierarchy is gonna be a game changer.

[Kevin Bianchi]

Finally, we have the button to only save our changes! 

Great and thanks a lot!

[Carol Jang]

@Judah great question, thanks for reaching out! The updates noted above are Cloud only. I'm currently unaware of any plans to add them to Data Center but, moving forward, please feel free to check for roadmap updates here: https://www.atlassian.com/roadmap/data-center?product=jsw&search=

[Irene]

@jacob.nielsen yes! The new Parent field will be fully rolled out by the end of this calendar year. It is already being rolled out for the Beta group customers (the expression of interest for that is already closed unfortunately in case you are interested) to get early feedback. 

Here for more details: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Flexible-naming-of-epics-is-almost-here-Sign-up-for-early-access/ba-p/2470456

[Collista Lewingdon]

My company is finally upgrading to Premium after a year of trying to convince them and I am ecstatic! I cannot wait to start using the planning template for our teams. 

[Christoph]

Hi there - not sure if this the best place to ask this question, but we are currently evaluating Advanced Roadmaps and wonder why we can't do any planning on single persons. Like what is the current / future work load for person A or B. We find AR pretty good for planning "teams" but somehow we can't find the right "button" for individual team members. Or do we need some kind of extension / other product to achieve this kind of personal planning ??? Thanks in advance :) Christoph

[Siobhan Flynn]

I'm a bit confused as to how this is a project template. I'm aware of Advanced Roadmaps/Plans and how to use them- but as a template, wouldn't you be setting up a new project? What for? I've read the documentation and I'm not quite wrapping my head around the template aspect.... thanks in advance for any help!

[Roi Fine]

Hey @Siobhan Flynn

I'm sorry for the confusion. In the new template you have:

A project - To create a new issue type called initiative and store it

A plan - To plan and track the initiatives in the best possible way (roll up progress from other projects in your Jira)

The top-level planning template's goal is to help new Premium customers to start planning and reporting initiative-level (above epic) work in Jira Software. With the template, we help customers who are new to initiatives by auto-creating:

• The issue type called initiative
• A dedicated project where these initiatives will be stored
• A pre-configured Plan where these initiatives could be broken down and tracked with visibility of rolled-up progress

You have more info here

I hope that makes sense, happy to chat further if you're interested.

Cheers

[Rhys Christian]

Hey @Christoph

There is the ability to group by Assignee, which will structure the plan into swimlanes of each assignee associated with the issues in your plan. Is this what you are looking to achieve?

You can enable this from the View settings > Group By > Assignee: