What’s coming soon for roadmaps and Advanced Roadmaps in Jira Software

[#1]

Hi folks! I’m Pete Morris - a Product Manager working across our roadmaps and Advanced Roadmaps experiences in Jira Software Cloud.

Over the last 18 months, we have seen how demands put on teams have drastically increased the complexities of work. With complexity comes a greater need for visibility and having the right tools to plan and manage work effectively. This is why our team is focused (and really passionate) about continually improving the planning experience in Jira Software Cloud.

We’re excited to share what’s coming for roadmaps and Advanced Roadmaps, but first I wanted to share a few of the incredible updates we’ve shipped over the last year in case you missed it!

New and improved planning experiences:

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Roadmaps

Our team-level planning experience was built to help all teams visually manage their dependencies and track progress on the big picture in real-time. Support for company-managed projects (formerly classic projects) was one of our most popular requests!

Since its launch in the fall of 2020, we’ve improved the following:

• Visualize and manage sprint assignments from your roadmap: You can now plan story-level issues in sprints. Once dates are added to sprints in your backlog, bars will display the duration on your roadmap. Easily drag-and-drop your stories into sprints or move issues between sprints.

via GIPHY

• Reduce the clutter to focus on what’s most relevant: We’ve made it easier to hide your done epics so you can focus on what's next. Simply toggle on or off which status you want to see from All to Complete, or Incomplete. We’ve also added additional text and label filters to make it easier to find the work that you want to plan by filtering by the issue name and/or the label.

• Performance, performance, performance: Roadmaps have gotten a lot faster. We’ve optimized the load time and many interactions to make everything feel a lot snappier.

• Planning flexibility: Reorder and reparent child issues so you can manage priorities and break down your work directly from the roadmap.

via GIPHY

Advanced Roadmaps

We launched Advanced Roadmaps, our solution for teams-of-teams, in our Premium edition in May 2020. It has been incredibly exciting watching you all discover and adopt our newest planning experience.

Here is a roundup of the biggest updates since the launch:

• Spin up a plan quickly: A revamped plan wizard simplifies how you create a plan and connect it to your teams' work so you can spend less time setting up and more time planning.

• Customize your views: With saved views, you can use any of the many view options and then save your configuration for reference later.

• Stay ahead of dependencies: The dependency report makes it easier to map dependencies across teams, projects, and initiatives, spot bottlenecks, and understand how a delay in one team may impact many others.

• Simplified plan navigation: we simplified the plan’s controls and introduced a collapsible header to maximize the timeline view.

• Do more from your plan’s timeline: Enjoy vastly more intuitive interactions with the timeline as dependencies can now be represented by lines (or badges) and you can scroll through your planned work by scrolling forward / backward - just like the roadmaps experience in your team’s project!

via GIPHY

• Keep stakeholders in the loop: Provide even more context by embedding your plan in a Confluence page with the Advanced Roadmaps Confluence macro.

What’s coming next:

• Improvements to story-level planning in roadmaps: We’ll continue to iterate on your most requested feature - the ability to plan story-level issues on the timeline.

• Teams going global - We’re working towards unifying the concept of “teams” across all Atlassian products so that the team you use in Advanced Roadmaps is the same team you use in Jira Software, Confluence, Opsgenie, etc.

• Investigations into incorporating uncertainty in planning: Agile planning is often fluid and responsive - we know that dates aren’t always the best solution for long-term planning. We’re exploring better ways to plan that embrace uncertainty and fluidity that can come with longer-term planning.

• Team-managed project (formerly Next-gen projects) support in Advanced Roadmaps - this is probably our most sought-after request for Advanced Roadmaps. I’m excited to confirm that we’ve started laying the foundations by simplifying Jira’s issue hierarchy. We’ll be able to share an approximate timeframe in the future.

• Sharing your plan made easier: You will soon have the option to export a snapshot of your plan’s timeline as an image (PNG file) to easily share progress with stakeholders.

As always, we’d love to hear from you! You can leave a comment below or use the “Give feedback” button in product - this feedback goes directly to our teams.

Thanks and happy planning!

Pete

p.s.

If you haven’t taken Advanced Roadmaps for a test drive, you can start a free trial of Jira Software Cloud Premium (go to billing → manage subscriptions → change plans). If you're new to Jira, you can learn more about roadmaps in Jira Software here.

[Ravi Sagar _Sparxsys_]

That's great @Pete Morris Looking forward to see the upcoming changes.

[Suvradip Paul]

Thanks @Pete Morris  for this article on roadmaps and Advanced Roadmaps! 

Would you mind if I circulate this outside Atlassian Community for info?

[Alex Murillo]

@Pete Morris It's very good to hear that Advanced Roadmaps are coming to Team Managed projects but unfortunately this still feels far off, and a bit depressing to hear.

Are there any improvements coming to Team Managed Roadmaps in the short term, as in this month or the next?

For example, low-hanging-fruit changes of this type would be very useful, while waiting for Advanced Roadmaps support:

1. Add ability to display a Due Date column, right after the title column.

2. Add ability to include child items into the view, which are collapsed by default.

3. Add ability to expand or collapse all items at once.

4. Add ability to word-wrap the title column.

5. Add ability to display the Sprint number only (e.g. S10) and not the full sprint name, since it gets truncated and is not very useful in its current format.

6. Add ability to select rows without actually displaying the side bar detail.

7. Remove released versions from the Versions drop-down list.

[Dave Mathijs]

Thanks @Pete Morris ! Exited to welcome the upcoming changes, especially the unified Teams approach across all Atlassian products. Please do more with the People section and link people to teams in a way that the list of assignees is limited to the specified team.

[Jon Petrie]

The new features in the standard roadmaps is great and actually find this very useful compared to advanced roadmaps that we also have access to. It would be good to see how full a sprint (or the quantity of story points it has allocated) in the 'standard roadmap' - on hover or visually. Looking forward to more updates and this area of jira seems to being focused on which is fantastic - thanks!

[cwcheung1]

Nice features! Quick tip - use animated GIFs on loop instead of videos to showcase the features; the current videos end too quickly and are quickly replaced with YouTube recommendations, making it hard to actually see what's going on.

[Kelly Drozd]

@[deleted] Ah! thanks for the tip. Working on getting it fixed. 

[Josh McManus]

While this certainly is exciting to see, I think it's worth saying here that my organization is still significantly impacted by the removal of Capacity Planning. This was a feature we leveraged quite heavily in Live Plans, and we even had a way of using it to add in "fuzziness" buffer for work that was further out in the plan. Please consider bringing in this feature or an equivalent alternative to Advanced Roadmaps!

[Production Management]

I hope that Atlassian fixes 5000 issues limitation in Advanced Roadmaps. We have a team of about 50 developers working on same product and the limit is frustrating.

[raconceicao]

Nice! Can't wait for the updates and for our teams to join in the action

[Pete Morris]

@Suvradip Paul Sure!

@Alex Murillo Thanks for your input. We have no plans to add column data to the project/board-level roadmaps view in the short term. We want to keep this view as simple and accessible as possible. We are, however, adding story-level work items to the view very soon. I've also passed your other suggestions on to the team for future consideration.

@Jon Petrie We don't have any immediate plans to display sprint capacity on the project/board-level roadmaps view but I'll pass your suggestion on to the team.

@Josh McManus I'm sorry to hear that the removal of this feature was disruptive to you - it was a really hard decision for us to make. We know that many folks are still after an equivalent capability in the new interface (or elsewhere in Jira Software) and this may be an area we investigate in the future.

@Production Management Scale and performance improvements for Advanced Roadmaps are also on our near term roadmap - hopefully we'll have more to share soon!

[Lina Massarwa]

Interesting!

Hi Pete,

There is an upcoming feature of having the ability to the roadmap to contain issues from different projects?

Thanks

[ElodieB]

Hi @Pete Morris 

Do you plan to add the "Team-managed project support in Advanced Roadmaps" into your public Jira Software Cloud Roadmap ?

Thanks,
Elodie

[Jimi Wikman]

"I'm sorry to hear that the removal of this feature was disruptive to you - it was a really hard decision for us to make. We know that many folks are still after an equivalent capability in the new interface (or elsewhere in Jira Software) and this may be an area we investigate in the future."

Two things: NOTIFY YOUR USERS WHEN YOU REMOVE CRUCIAL FEATURES. I am yelling because this is BS and I am getting sick of this obfuscation of information.

Removing functionality that severely reduce the usefulness of an application should be highlighted in bold red and sent out to every single user that you reduce value for. For me, I have several clients that now have absolutely no use for Advanced Roadmaps because capacity planning was the reason to use it.

Secondly, if you take away a key feature, then it is NOT good enough to just say that it was a hard decision. Either provide a solution to replace the lost function, or allow users to stay on the current code base until you do. Do NOT push disruptive updates to clients like you did now.

I am sorry, I liked Advanced Roadmaps and had many clients that I sold it to based on it's great features. This is not a good way to treat customers, and I will issue requests for refund for all clients that you pushed this to that now have to find a different solution to manage their portfolio need.

Since it is impossible to even test Align I would not be surprised if more than one of these client will seriously consider going with another company since Atlassian have lost a lot of goodwill lately...

After 10+ years being an Atlassian supporter and teaching 10.000+ users in how to use your products, I am seriously considering if I feel comfortable doing so anymore. I was even AUG for two years...

This was NOT ok.

[Jimi Wikman]

@Lina MassarwaThe Roadmap is a different product. I also hope they add that to Roadmaps, but I think that goes against the purpose of Roadmaps.

Advanced Roadmaps let you add any issues from projects, boards and filters.

[Jimi Wikman]

"I hope that Atlassian fixes 5000 issues limitation in Advanced Roadmaps. We have a team of about 50 developers working on same product and the limit is frustrating."

@Production Managementdo you have 100 issues for each developer active in the plan? Are you by any chance keeping old issues or the full backlog in there that is causing the issue?

I sometimes create an issue type called Idea that is used for backlog items that are not up for prioritization. That way I can filter them out from the plans to make sure only what is relevant is shown there. I also delete backlog items on a regular basis to remove clutter, and in some cases I have even separated the ideation and good ideas to a separate Jira project all together.

Would something like that help manage the number of issues in your plan?

[Pete Morris]

@Lina Massarwa - We have no plans to do this for the time being - Advanced Roadmaps has been designed for cross-board, project, and team capabilities and may be better suited to your use case.

@ElodieB - Yes, we will add it when we have a bit more confidence in a potential ship date.

@Jimi Wikman I really appreciate your comment. We don't remove features often, but when we do we complete months of analysis, planning, and communication. We did try to ensure that the very small minority of users who still used this feature were aware of this change by displaying in-product notifications and a banner at the top of the legacy interface before removing it. This included a way of contacting us if the user considered the change to be very disruptive. I'm sorry that these messages didn't reach you and we will endeavour to do better in the future. In the meantime, would you be open to helping us better understand your capacity planning needs? If so, please reach out to me at pmorris@atlassian.com and I'll put you in touch with the right people.

[Production Management]

@Jimi Wilkman we have 10+ products that share same backends and are in active development. Each week QA finds 100+ bugs. I already discussed with management that we should not track bugs and QA activities in developers project nor should we add them to sprints - but it is hard to change their minds.

On my previous work QA had no relation to devs at all. They had their own projects in Jira, own sprints and own workflows. After devs provided a build, they could close the sprint immediately and start working on next one. And QA could plan their sprints independently, taking less urgent products into testing if they had no work.

Where I work now everything is mixed up - devs, dev ops, QA, analytics and even marketing. That's how we get 1000+ issues in Roadmap.

[Jimi Wikman]

@Pete MorrisI appreciate the offer and I will take you on that :)

I wrote down my thoughts in this blogpost if you want to comment on it:
https://jimiwikman.se/articles/professional/the-importance-of-communication-when-trust-dies-horribly-and-organizations-fail-r229/

[Iwan Junaydy]

@Pete Morris Correct me if I am wrong, Programs are also not available in the Advanced Roadmaps Cloud as per https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOCLOUD-1767. What happens to the existing programs on Jira DC when migrated to the Cloud ?

[Tara L Conklin]

@Pete Morris - Thank you and the team for continuing to update this product. We recently upgraded from Jira basic to premium for the Advanced Roadmaps and we're slowing learning to use it. It's not entirely intuitive but we're getting there. 

With this said, the current capacity planning in AR is not a feasible solution. The 'set it and forget it' simply doesn't work as it doesn't account for variable capacity based on 

• reduced staff due to holidays
• vacation, sick time, or medical leave
• 'switch-hitter developers' - those that split their time between two teams and that time may vary based on the needs from sprint to sprint/week to week. 

I understand the Atlassian Teams use both, Agile/Scrum planning and Advanced Roadmaps and would like to know how you are planning long initiatives with your teams without the ability to account for changes in capacity. 

There are two issues open to address the capacity shortfall and pain point users would very much like to see moved up the escalation ladder. Jira is a superior product in many ways but in essential features such as planning & capacity management it falls terribly short of your competition such as TFS, Monday.com, & Asana. 

Thank you for your efforts & consideration. 

[Dan Paton]

Hi @Pete Morris . Is there any way to configure different hierarchies per Jira project please? Either currently or as a future jira improvement on the AR roadmap? As a business with several hundred projects we have exceptional project that require a non-standard AR hierarchy to others...

[Tara L Conklin]

@Pete Morris - We've been trying to figure out how to make the most of Advanced Roadmaps, and justify upgrading our Jira instance to premium at double the cost. 

At the beginning of a plan it's essential to 

A. define the scope and work. 

B. identify necessary teams and capacity based on known factors like PTO, Holidays etc. 

C. set the 'target/planned' start and due dates then snap a baseline. 

D. kick off the plan. 

E. As the plan progresses, it should be easy to see if it's on track or not to meet that baseline target. 

After a few weeks it seems B, C, and E are missing in Advanced Roadmaps. 

These are basic project management planning essentials and we ask, is there any reason these cannot be added to the product in the near future? 

Thank you. 

[Robin Klein]

Hi @Pete Morris

I did a bit off searching on this across the different documentation / community pages on Advanced Roadmaps but couldn't find a solution: I'm looking for ways how-to include external dependencies in the dependency report. 

When in- or outgoing dependencies are created from an issue in the plan to an issue outside the plan it shows up in the incoming / outgoing dependencies field, but not in the dependencies report. 

A lot of the Value Stream Leads, Product Owners, Portfolio Management users in our organization (financial, 12k Jira users) would like to have this functionality. Is there any way to include external dependencies in the dependency report? 

Thanks in advance!
Robin

[Ellen Beentjes]

I have another question. Our scrum teams have a sprint for multiple projects. These sprints don't shop up in the Roadmap view of the projects. Is this a feature that you are considering? Maintaining different sprint boards would be overkill and not helpful in planning for the whole team.