Introducing the Program board in Plans!

[#1]

Hey everyone, Rhys Christian here; I’m one of the Product Managers working on Plans in Jira.

Today marks a momentous occasion as we announce the Beta release of a new planning interface called The Program Board. It's coming out over the next week or so, so don't panic if you don't have it yet. 

Currently, the Program board is in Open Beta

We’ll get into some of the limitations of this version a little further down, but we’ve decided to release it because we want to hear your feedback. 

To see the limitations of the current version of the Program board, skip down to What are the limitations of the Beta version?

The Program board in Plans: what is it and why is it great

In short, the Program board is an interface that represents a short-to-mid-term planning window, allowing planners to coordinate and align the delivery plans of multiple teams at the team-of-teams level. If you want to read our documentation, start here. 

Those who use SAFe might know this concept as a Program board, a Program Increment board, a Quarterly plan, or an Increment plan. If you don’t know what SAFe is, don’t worry; it’s still a powerful tool for all teams to improve their planning maturity.

Let’s take a look at what you’ll see:

• each column spans two weeks based on the start date you chose when you created your board
  • you can also associate sprints from a team to each column. That way, when you drag an issue to that column, it’s automatically assigned to their sprint. We talk more about sprints on your program board in our documentation. 
• each team included in your plan has their own row
• unplanned work items show in the left column under the label Drag issues to schedule

To schedule issues, drag them from the column labeled Drag issues to schedule to the appropriate column. When you do, the issue inherits that sprint assignment and is assigned to the team (if you move it to a new team’s row). From here, you can quickly schedule work for the next 12 weeks, and before you know it, you’re making large-scale changes to multiple teams' sprints at one time.

The Program board only shows issues that are configured at the level 1 and level 0 hierarchy levels (commonly referred to as the Epic and Story levels). Sub-tasks and custom hierarchy levels above Epic, such as Initiative, won’t currently show on this view.

Before you use the Program board

Before you start planning with the Program board, there are a few things that we recommend doing to make for a smoother experience.

1. Teams are required to use the Program board - Create or add your teams, and configure them in your plan before you start planning. 
2. Create sprints for the coming quarter for all of your scrum teams - When you add a team’s sprints to your board, you’ll need to add a team’s sprints to all of the columns at one time. You won’t be able to add three then come back later to add the rest.
3. Add a custom field or label to the work you want to plan - By default, your Program board includes all future work from your plan with To do or In progress statuses. To declutter the planning view, planners should tag the work (both parent and child issues) they want to include for the upcoming iteration using either a custom field (single-select or multi-select) or the Label field. You can then use this field as a filter when you create your Program board.

See why we recommend you do these before you use the Program board. 

What are the limitations of the Beta version?

The Program board that’s coming to your site is an early build. We’ve released it to the world because we want to hear what you have to say about it, and how we can improve it in the future. 

That said, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles yet though we have more features planned for the future. In the meantime, there are a few caveats you should know about:

• The Program Board isn’t designed for real-time collaborative planning sessions (such as Big Room Planning). It doesn't accommodate a large number of inputs like you’d find in a Big Room Planning session. For now, we recommend using a white-boarding tool such as Confluence Whiteboards alongside the Program board.
• The Program board represents a 12-week period. When you create your Program board, Jira creates six columns that each represent an iteration lasting two weeks. The length of the quarter and the number of columns can’t be changed yet.
• Each plan can support two active program boards. A Program board is considered active if its end date is in the future. Once a Program board’s end date passes, the board is completed and no longer counts against your allotment of active boards.

All that’s left is to have fun with it!

[Niklas Zarnecke]

Hi @Rhys Christian

thank you for the great overview! Sadly we cannot use teams in the current form, we need to have the ability to restrict who can create teams.

Are there plans to integrate the programm board based on other filter options?

Best Regards
Niklas

[Joanna Maciag]

Would it be released to JIRA Data Center as well ?

[alampreave]

This is great. But... how do you create a Program Board? The links on the article just open Google 

[Eddie Meardon]

@alampreave sorry about that. The page has been updated :) 

Note that it's still rolling out, so you might not see it yet. 

[Dave Mathijs]

Great to see SAFe features are not restricted to Jira Align only. A Planning Interval as it called today, right?

[Maggie Joseph]

Any other option?

[Rhys Christian]

Thanks for letting us know your challenges with the Team field @Niklas Zarnecke

There are plans to improve the governance of teams that may make it possible for you to adopt them in the future.

For now, the limitation in Program Boards is that the Team field is the only way we currently can group swim-lanes. So not using teams would result in all issues being under a single 'unassigned' swimlane. 

It would very helpful for us to know what kind of field you are using to distribute work across teams instead of the Team field as we may be able to consider alternative fields to group-by in the Program Board. (Note: However with additional group options, grouping by our Team field would be the only group-type able to use Sprints in the Program Board).

Thank you for your feedback.

[Rhys Christian]

@Joanna Maciag - No sorry, there aren't plans to bring this to Jira Data Center.

[Niklas Zarnecke]

Hi @Rhys Christian 

currently we use a customfield for the distrubition of the work.
It basically does the same as the native Team field.

The projects then filter for task in the project or the associtaed customfield entry.

[João Tiago Candeias Correia]

Hi,
An Epic may span multiple sprints. If you want to do a Quarterly Planning at Epic Level how do you represent that in Program Board? (It seems we can only assign to 1 Sprint)

Thanks,

[Eddie Meardon]

Hi @João Tiago Candeias Correia 

The Program board focuses on scheduling issues at the story level. You can roll the information of these stories up to the Epic level (and infer the details of the Epic from the scheduled stories), but the Epics themselves aren't able to be scheduled on the Program Board. We made this decision in line with the general advice of Agile planning which is to break work down into the smallest chunks possible. 

In your Program board, Epics are shown in the column in which their stories are expected to be completed. This way, if you schedule your stories on the Program board then go back to the timeline and enable rollups, the Epics are up to date with the information from the child issues. 

Hope this helps. 

Cheers

Eddie

[Lori Surapaneni]

I am noticing that when I choose the start date of the PI as 6/28 my board appears but the dates are not correct it has 6/28 to 7/12, my sprints are two weeks 6/28 to 7/11. Also the end date of the sprint is the start date of the next sprint on the program board 7/12 - 7/26. 

[Eddie Meardon]

HI @Lori Surapaneni

The dates at the top of the columns are generated when you create your board. That said, these dates do not update when you add sprints because a column contains multiple sprints for different teams, which themselves might not align on one set date range.

When you add sprints to the board then drag an issue to a team's section, the sprint dates (configured in your board) are what's used to schedule that issue. The dates at the top of the column remain so you can see approximately what window of time you're planning for (though not 100% accurate, as you're referencing).

Does this make sense? It's a very niche logic, but one that we had to adopt in order to accommodate planning for multiple teams. 

Cheers

Eddie

[Kenneth L Brister]

We are unable to associate the Program Board Sprints to the sprints on our teams project. I have created a team, made sure that team was part of the project. I've re-created the program board multiple times using different projects, all with the same result. The modal shows all 6 sprints, but I am unable to associate those sprints with the sprints in the project.

[Lori Surapaneni]

If you create a Program Board will this affect or tie to your 'Plan' or any sprints that you pre-planned? Or is the Program Board independent on its own for right now? Trying to make sure if I test drive a Program Board it will not affect my plan or my pre-planned sprints?

[Eddie Meardon]

@Lori Surapaneni the program board only looks at issues with an active status ("To to" or In progress"). If you're planning for Q4 which is a few months away, and you don't want to include the work that's already scheduled but still in one of those status categories, then we recommend tagging the issues you want to include on the program board, and using that label or custom field as a filter. We talk more about how to prepare your planning environment here. 

[Eddie Meardon]

HI @Kenneth L Brister

Sorry to hear you're having trouble with this. I'm not 100$ sure what's going on, but I'd recommend reaching out to support for help. They'll be able to troubleshoot with you and answer your questions with more clarity. 

Cheers

Eddie

[Hari Shankar S]

@Rhys Christian - While creating the Program board  - 6 Sprints have created ( 5 Sprint and IP Sprint ) We can use this for PI Planning , Unfortunately the dates of the Sprint is overlapping ( Example If create a 2 weeks Sprint - Starting 25th Sep - Should end on 8th oct , instead the system is picking 9th Oct , Also Second Sprint End date is same as third Sprint Start date - It is overlapping - Is this something a Know Bug ? Are we fixing this ?  

 

[Mariam Slade]

Is the Program Board open beta something we need to opt into or will program boards just show up in our plans at some point? Ideally, I'd like to test it out in our sandbox and communicate the new feature to users before enabling in production. 

[Rhys Christian]

@Hari Shankar S  - Thanks for letting us know this issue is impacting you. Yes we plan to fix this.

@Mariam Slade  - No there is no opt process. This Open Beta is available for Cloud customers using Jira Plans (though it's still be pending release for customers on Release Track).

[Joshi]

I have started using Program Boards in couple of projects so far. Thank you for providing this Excellent tool for project management.

Improvement feedbacks

(1) Can we add capability to see Ticket status inside each card of the Program Board (similar to Kanban board)?

(2) It would be good to have ability to see Ticket details upon clicking a card in the Program Board. Behavior already seen in Kanban board.

[Lior Snider]

Hi, 

We are looking at using the plan / program board and what we are missing is the capability to see the assignee or in our case - feature developer (custom field) and in general - to be able to control the fields presented in the cards - As this capability already exists - would expect it here from day 1

[Ashley Stephens]

@Rhys Christian Hi Rhys, are there plans for trainings (live or in the enablement academy) for this product? I'm interested in implementing it with a client and would love to have an overview training about it. 

[Jonny Lu]

Hi @Joshi - Thanks for your feedback!

1) Currently, we only indicate 'done' issues by striking through their summaries. We do have plans to add more fields to issue cards and make the issue cards configurable. We will consider adding issue status.

2) We're working on adding the issue model from Plan's timeline to the program board, which will let you read and edit issue summary and description. Similar to how the timeline works, you can click on the issue keys in the cards to see the issue details in a new tab.

[Ірина Семеновська]

Hi,

The feature looks really exciting! 

It would be nice to have the option to save the Program board setting (Project, Epic, Type filters). This way we could avoid adding a label to each story/task inside Epics.