Plan Epics in Parallel in Jira Plans

[Johannes Nyberg]

Hi, 

My team is working on three epics in parallel. This is now done over 5 sprints. But Jira Plans is currently allocating all sprint resources to the highest prioritise epic. And when that one is done it will allocate all resources to the next one. 

This doesnt reflect reality in our case. 

Image one shows how my three test epics is planned to be done at the same time. Picture two then says everything is allocated to TJ-60. 



Similar case would be if there is only one Epic being worked on. I would like to be spread out in time. The image below shows an example where the Epic is finished before it "should be". This can be solved with sprint capacities of course. But wondering if there is a way to actually spread it out in time according to start and end date. 

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Johannes Nyberg,

In a scrum board in Jira, you normally can't schedule Epics in a sprint. They live in the Epics panel in the backlog where they help you filter the Epics' child issues for sprint planning, but in reality it is those child issues that are planned in sprints instead. The sprint allocation that you can see in plans then rolls up from the planned child issues. It is not clear from your screenshots how/where these child issues are scheduled, but from your explanation I have an educated guess that this might be causing what you see.

If you allocate the stories/tasks underneath the epics to the sprints they are expected to end up in (and let the epic timeline roll up from the child issues' schedule), I would expect your plan to reflect reality better.

Hope this helps!

[Johannes Nyberg]

Hi Walter! Thanks for your reply. Maybe my question and sample pictures made it easy to be confused. Let me clarify. I am trying to achieve a long term capacity planning for my organization. At least 6 months out.

We currently plan in increments, 3 sprints, 6 weeks. Which is done according to your guidelines above. But filling up sprints with stories 6 months out is not feasible in our situation, we have to many unknowns.

But we have a good guess of what epics that will be adressed by then. And these, if possible, we would like to visualize in parallell in the Jira Plans. 

Do you see what I mean? 

[Walter Buggenhout]

I was more or less assuming that that was your approach. It won't work that way, unfortunately. If you add issues to a sprint, they will be planned with start and end dates matching the start and end dates of that sprint. That is not possible if your issues are too large to fit in a single sprint, which is - almost by definition - the case for Epics.

A workaround might be to just use the start and end dates to schedule your epics on the timeline and remove the sprint allocation from them (they can't be added to a sprint on your scrum board anyway). That should make it possible to plan them concurrently on your timeline.

As you then start adding stories underneath and plan those in your sprints, the timelines you defined on the epics will start to act as a control point to see if you can still deliver them as expected. If stories get planned into sprints later than the Epic due date, you should see warnings appear in your plan about child issues exceeding their parent's due date.

[Johannes Nyberg]

Thank you Walter. I suspected this was the case. 

The work-around you suggest is currently what we do. But that results in the images above, i.e not concurrenly. They are planned one after the other. I guess we will have to continue with this. 

Once I start to add stories to the sprints everything solves itself. It is the long term (+6 months) that is currently my issue.