Looking for recommendations / best practice on setting up plans with 20+ teams

[Andrew Frayling]

Hi all,

We're just getting started with Advanced Roadmaps and I'm looking for some advice / recommendations / best practices when setting up plans with 20+ teams that are working on 10+ products at any one time.

Looking at the performance recommendations at https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirakb/how-to-improve-performance-for-advanced-roadmaps-1168857152.html it advises not using more than 4 issue sources, so configuring a plan to use 20+ scrum boards doesn't seem like it's going to be viable. What we've done instead is create a single scrum board that looks across all 20+ teams and just 1 product and this seems reasonably performant (it's not great, but is usable), but the capacity planning piece is a mess because it's duplicating every sprint for every team.

Thinking we might have to set things up with:

• A separate plan for every team to do the capacity management piece
• A separate plan for every product that pulls in all team (but forget trying to do capacity management on that plan)
• A program that pulls in every product plan

Does that sound sensible?

Every demo I've seen of Advanced Roadmaps has very simple team/project structures (I think the max I've seen is 4 teams on one plan and they were all working on just 1 product), but we're a little bit more complicated than that and we're having some issues figuring out how to make Advanced Roadmaps work for us.

Thanks,

Andrew.

[Mark Segall · Accepted solution]

Hi @Andrew Frayling - You're hitting on the limitation of Advanced Roadmaps.  I would imagine you're also going to start hitting the 5k issue limitation with 20+ teams.

I think you're on the right track by creating various plans based upon the insights you need at any given point. I have taken similar approaches with my clients dealing with multiple interconnected teams/products.

Atlassian does offer Jira Align. However, to get the most out of the additional investment it would require, your teams should be well into adoption of a agile at scale methodology.

[Andrew Frayling]

Thanks @Mark Segall , thanks for the confirmation on the reality check that Advanced Roadmaps has some limitations once you get past a certain size or level of complexity.

We were definitely hitting the 5K issue limitation when I tried putting everything on 1 plan, but splitting plans by product seems to be keeping us under that limit at the moment. I'll continue with the splitting plans approach for now as I think that still has some value in being able to see an individual product roadmap and whether that product is on or off track.

We're 3 years into SAFe so have been agile at scale for a while, but not sure I could get budget approval for Jira Align right now.

Cheers,

Andrew.