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.

[Ankit Litoriya]

I am looking for some more use cases, that can help me manage my plans better. The insights given here are useful, but if you are aware of any links or groups that could provide me more use cases in detail will be very helpful. Thanks

[Peggy Graham]

@Ankit Litoriya - This is from a few years ago, but I still like it as it shows how Atlassian uses Plans: How Atlassian Uses Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) 

The interface to Plans has had some changes since then, so you may want to reference these tutorials which should be more current: Advanced planning in Jira tutorials or there is free online training for Plans - Visualize work across teams with plans in Jira.

That being said, those will give you the mechanics of USING Plans, but not really what I think you were asking, which was more around use cases or WHY would you use Plans?

Plans goes above and beyond the timeline in your Jira Software projects - you can add multiple projects to a single plan, up to 5,000 issues.

With these projects and issues added to your Plan, you can do the following:

1. Plan the work before you begin, viewing things like capacity, cross-team dependencies and time frame for delivery
2. Track the progress of work as you go, seeing where you are on track, where things might be slipping and making it easier to respond to changes in your plan
3. Use for reporting out progress to stakeholders

Plans allows for a custom hierarchy, so you can add Initiatives, Themes, etc., above an Epic, and plan out larger work items to give you a "big picture" plan, as well as detailed capacity based plans showing the work split out across future sprints.

When you create a plan, you can do various what-if scenarios and none of the changes you make to your issues on the plan will be updated in your Jira projects until you click Save Changes.  So, you can plan for best case and worst case scenarios and then update Jira with the final plan, once approved.

@Ankit Litoriya - does that help?

[Ankit Litoriya]

Thanks @Peggy Graham 

You got my pain areas, actually i am looking for a solution that can help me in tracking my teams with there weekly tasks and track them with time frame. I tried diferent perspects to achieve this and came to use the plan feature but we were not able to pictorize in how to use this for our team. How to represent the data ?

[Peggy Graham]

@Ankit Litoriya - Have you reviewed the summary page of Plans?  It's accessible from the upper left corner:

and looks like this:

You'll see at the top that it has a date range, which you can change.  This view provides a nice overview of everything going on across all the work you've brought into the Plan.  It's Jira software  project centric (as are Plans in general).  There's also a single project summary like this in all Jira business projects for those that are less driven by stories, sprints and dependencies:

If that's not what you're looking for, then I have some other ideas...  One idea is a Jira dashboard with widgets that show just the Jira issues you are concerned with, giving you a single page to view everything or do you use Confluence?  Another option is to use the Jira macro on a Confluence page to display the Jira issues you want and you can also add any other context, etc., to the page.

If I'm off-track, please let me know and share what you can regarding what you're looking for...