Advanced Roadmap sharing

[Benjamin]

Hi there,

Recently we have migrated back to Jira Classic project type (Company Managed). This was due to the lack the ability to use Advanced Roadmaps in combination with Next-Gen project type (I know this will be soon available soon by Atlassian). What we have right now is Jira Company Managed project in combination with Advanced Roadmaps. This Roadmap is being used to overview all our projects, see in what state we are and share them with all internal non-technical stake holders (e.g. CEO, management).

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Our development team is using the following levels: Initiative > Epic > Tasks > Subtasks

- Our Initiatives are used for big ideas. In the Initiatives we write down our big goals related to one specific topic (for example: developing a new Analytics Tool). These big goals cannot be achieved in one single release, so we will split them into multiple smaller epics.

- Our epics are being used for clear projects with a start and a end. This means that the scope of these epics is very clear and we can plan on it. Inside the epic we will describe the scope. Also with non-technical descriptions so non-technical stake holders are able to understand what the epic/project is about.

- Inside the epics we manage our technical tasks. These are real technical tasks. Which means that non-technical stake holders should NOT see these tasks. It's only used by development team and technical project management.

- Inside this same epics we also have created a task type called Project Management. These tasks are being used to control the overview and progress of the epis/project. For example defining the period for testing, defining the period for development and planning the release date. These tasks SHOULD be visible by stake holders.

Our goal:
We would like to share our Roadmap with Non-technical stake holders. This means that we want to give them the ability to:

- see the overview of the epics on the roadmap (levels initiative > epic)

- be able to open those levels and see the descriptions to understand the projects

- not being bothered with any technical tasks

- do the project management type task to control steps of project

Our problem:

- Right now even if I filter out the technical tasks, you will still see them and be able to click on it. Is there a way how to hide the technical tasks in the roadmap?

- All stake holders need Jira account in order to see the advanced roadmap, no problem but soon we also would like to share this roadmap to external partners. Preferable without Jira account but are able to see and open the Initiative + epic + project management tasks. I know this might not be possible due to basic principles of Atlassian. But will it be possible then to hide the technical tasks (and not even allow them to open them, even when they have the deeplinks).

Hope someone can help me with some best practices in order to sharpen our proces! Thanks! 

> Attached a screenshot of our set up: 

Kind Regards

[Curt Holley]

Hi @Benjamin 

Do you have the "Show full hierarchy" checkbox ticked or unticked at the bottom of the "Filters" section of your plan?

As having that unticked should remove the lower levels when you set the Hierarchy to only show Initiatives and Epics.

[Benjamin]

Thanks for the quick reply. This is great. This is exactly what we need. 
On top of this we just added 'labels' to the projects and tasks we would like to share with the people who we share the roadmap with. Projects and tasks we don't want to share are filtered out based on these labels.

But then the last thing remains: what is the best practice when it's about sharing the roadmap to people out of our organisation. I understand the basic principles of Atlassian requiring everybody - who want to access the roadmap - to have a Jira account. Although I prefer to be able to access without account, I understand this.

But providing all our stakeholder with a Jira account means that they have the ablility to click on the issue numbers, accessing our Jira backlog and seaching, finding and viewing other issues as well. And thus also issues that we have filtered out from the roadmap view, because they might contain not sharable information. 

Hope someone can help us out. Thanks!

[Rhys Christian]

Hey Benjamin - Thanks for reaching out to the community and letting us know about your sharing needs and additional context.

I'm a PM on the Advanced Roadmaps team and we're currently working on the ability to export the plan as a PNG image. It's in the works now and would allow you to take a snapshot of the plan (with any filters you apply, as well as visible columns + timeline). Do you think this will serve what you're trying to achieve?

Though, I recognise one of the missing functionality you need won't be available in our solution: the ability to access the description of issues. 

One of the limitations we'll face initially is a limit to the number of issues that can be included in a single export. This is for performance reasons. Could you please clarify, roughly how many issues would you be looking to include in sharing of the roadmap?

Cheers,

[Benjamin]

Thanks for getting back to my request. Good to hear a PNG export is coming up. One thing I notice about PNG is how to manage the time line view? For example when you have several projects spread over a bigger time span? How to gather that in one view?

Second thing you mention is indeed about the ability to see the content of the issues. For now I think we will manually create a place holder webpage on the page where we will share this PNG version of the roadmap as well. Its manual work, but once a week this could do the trick (it also gives us the ability to describe specific context suitable for the stakeholders, and what they are not allowed to see). 

About the amount of projects. As I mention we have initiatives > epics. Inside the epics we have a new issue type (Project Process) that describes the steps of the project with the child tasks. Currently we have about 4-5 initiatives with each have about 4-5 epics. In this epics we have 5 project management tasks to track the progress of the project. Below an attachment of the current view:

Hope it helps and its usefull information. Feel free to contact us for more information about this topic, for example more details about our business use case.

[Nikki Leonard]

@Benjamin @Rhys Christian Glad I stumbled upon this thread. We have a similar challenge and need at my organization. 

We need the ability to share an advanced roadmap view with external stakeholders. We have partners as well as funding agencies that are invested in the overall milestones and roadmap. We are planning to adopt advanced roadmaps in replace of other timeline tools such as Microsoft Project. 

You mention a PNG. This is a step in the right direction, but we are building high fidelity and in-depth schedules with this tool. We sometimes will have in the 1000s of tasks - we can filter of course but various stakeholders may be interested in different points so creating a view and exporting to PNG could get cumbersome quickly. 

What would be an extremely "nice to have" function would be the ability to generate and share a "public" or even password-protected link.  I was thinking to try some type of embed in confluence and then utilize the new feature of password-protected pages but it feels a little hacky and I'm not sure if that would even work at this point. 

[Luis.Ortega]

Hi @Rhys Christian

Any idea of timing? I see we can export to PNG in Roadmaps but not in Advanced Roadmaps. Thanks