Jira Plans - What you need to know...

[#1]

A colleague recently asked me if I had any Jira Plans (formerly known as Advanced Roadmaps) best practices. I immediately thought of several things that I would not really call best practices, but they are rather important details to be aware of before you get started creating Plans. Since I couldn’t find an article to share that covered all of this, I thought I might as well write one!

And, if you have run across any tips and tricks that I didn’t list here, please, add them in the comments! Thank you in advance for that, and let’s jump in!

Scrum and Kanban teams on the same plan:

If you have a mix of Scrum and Kanban teams on your plan, you will have to estimate in either hours or days, you won’t be able to use story points. Or, if you’ve already selected Story points for estimation, then Kanban will be grayed out as a team type. (Which is grayed out will depend on what you enter first: the team type or estimation.) The reason for this is that Kanban doesn’t use story points. If you need points, then split out the Kanban teams to a different plan.

Plan Limits:

Plans have an upper limit of 5,000 issues on the plan. This was previously displayed on the Create Plan screen and was very useful. I’m not sure why it’s not there any longer, but I have a workaround! When creating your plan, just add one issue source. Then, go to the plan settings -> Issue sources to add the rest. That will let you see the number of issues being added to the plan:

Create Plan:	Plan settings - Issue sources:

If the number of issues being added is getting too high, you can use exclusion rules to limit the number of issues being added, especially if you are creating a long-term plan. For example, if creating an annual plan, maybe only add epics and initiatives, do NOT add bugs or sub-tasks, perhaps not even stories and tasks.

Team-managed projects on your Plan:

While you can now add team-managed projects (TMP) to a Plan, there are some limitations to be aware of: Limitations of team-managed projects in your plan. If that causes any issues, then you can either create a separate plan for your team-managed projects OR you can bulk move Jira issues from a TMP to a company-managed project instead.

How to get Scrum sprints on the board:

If you have scrum teams, there are a few things you’ll need to do in order to get your team’s sprints and capacity added to the board so you get the following in your view:

1. When creating your plan, be sure to add issues for Scrum teams via the board. Sprints are part of the board, which means they won’t be available if issues are added via the project or JQL.

2. Make sure you have associated a team with your issue sources in the plan settings and entered the team's capacity. I use organization-shared teams, so I can reuse the team on different plans, etc.

3. Speaking of teams, you’ll need the team assigned to your issues via the team field. You can do that in bulk for all issues in your board by finding the board’s filter from the Filters drop-down at the top of Jira, just go to All Filters.

4. Lastly, under View settings, make sure you are grouped by Team, with Show capacity on timeline checked:

Now you’ll see the sprints from your project on the timeline, with projected future sprints for ones that don’t yet exist.

[Ashok Shembde]

Hi @Peggy Graham ,

Thanks for sharing! We gained valuable insights from your tips and are looking forward to applying them.