How to Create Cross-project Epic Roadmaps in Jira with Swanly

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Many of us started using project roadmaps in Jira that are now available by default in both company-managed and team-managed projects.

Project roadmaps are a great way to visualize and plan your project scope using Epics. But if you run many projects in Jira then a project roadmap isn’t enough. 

What we want to do is to keep using these project roadmaps in Jira and have one portfolio roadmap to see epics from select projects in one place.

When it comes to seeing these project roadmaps in one place there is not much you can do on the Standard Jira plan. And if you don’t want to upgrade to Jira Premium and are looking for a cheaper option that's where Swanly comes into play.

Example of cross-project roadmap 👀

Let me quickly show you how you can create these cross-project epic roadmaps with the Swanly Jira plugin.

I have 4 projects in my Jira that represent 3 different development teams and also a marketing team and each of them uses epics and a project roadmap to plan their work 👇

After you install the app from the Atlassian Marketplace you can access it via the main Jira navigation menu after you click on Apps and then Swanly Roadmaps. Then in the issue view, you simply import projects you would like to see on the roadmap.

And that’s it, we created your cross projects roadmap only in a few clicks!

Now if I update the start or end date of an epic or any issue in Swanly it will be also updated in the Jira ticket itself and on the Jira project roadmap. And of course, it does work the other way around as well.

How does it work? 🤔

Jira project roadmap stores its dates in custom fields called Start date and Due date. And Swanly then works with these dates to render the roadmap as well.

This all is done via a setting in Swanly where you can select what custom fields will map to start and end dates.

After you install the app Start date and Due date custom field will be selected by default. But you can always change that if you need to any other custom field which has a date format. 

You also don’t need to synchronize with any Jira fields if that’s something you are looking for. Just simply leave these fields empty and that's it.

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There are many more useful things that Swanly can do for you. It for example automatically generates reports so you can understand how is your team progressing on a certain Epic, and you can also share them!

👉 If you would like to give Swanly a try you can find it on the Atlassian Marketplace. 

There is a 30-days free trial and as a bonus, the app is free for up to 10 users 👏