What's changing with Advanced Roadmaps (formerly Portfolio for Jira Cloud)

[#1]

Hello Community!

Today we are excited to introduce Advanced Roadmaps, a major refresh of the product we previously called Portfolio for Jira Cloud. Advanced Roadmaps is designed to help you ship larger pieces of work faster and more reliably by building smarter plans. We believe this latest refresh will greatly improve your ability to get visibility into work happening across Jira Software, track dependencies across teams, plan with team capacity in mind, and communicate status across your organization.

This post will walk you through how the product experience has evolved in Advanced Roadmaps and how you can begin to make the most of these new capabilities.

Accessing your plans and upgrading to the new interface

You can find the new Advanced Roadmaps features under the Plans tab in your Jira Software navigation. Nothing will change for your existing Advanced Roadmaps plans until you opt them into the new experience.

When you are ready, just head into your plan’s settings (accessed via the “…” next to the plan’s name) and enable the “improved interface”. You can easily revert back if you later decide that you’re not ready for the change.

All newly created plans will have the improved interface by default.

A new way to plan

The older experience focused on a data-driven approach to planning, where the product would auto-schedule work into a roadmap view. We heard that this was unrealistic for many of you who just wanted to manually assign dates to work and communicate plans to stakeholders. Advanced Roadmaps provides a new “Roadmap” view that delivers an at-a-glance overview of in-progress and upcoming work. This view allows you to simply drag-and-drop any level of issue on the timeline in order to schedule it.

You can still automatically schedule your work via the “Auto-schedule” feature, allowing you to preview the changes and accept the parts that work for you and your teams.

A new way to report

We’ve removed the “Reports” tab and incorporated many of their insights directly into the extremely flexible timeline view, where it can provide a more complete and in-context picture with your plan.

For example, dependencies are now more visible on the timeline, allowing you to quickly identify those which may block your work and quickly resolve them.

You can also see your team’s sprint capacity by grouping by either Team or Sprint in the “View settings” and enabling “Show capacity on timeline”. We’ve refocused our capacity management features onto the “team” level as we believe Scrum concepts such as sprint velocity and capacity work better when applied to the whole team. Due to this refocus, we’ve removed working hours and days, skills/stages, individual absences and virtual team members. We also took the opportunity to remove the “Team Member” field when planning an issue to reduce confusion. Advanced Roadmaps now uses Jira Software’s “Assignee” field directly.

The flexibility of the timeline can provide many different views of your work and we’ll soon introduce a new feature that will allow you to save these views for sharing or later reference.

Small improvements that will still have a big impact

Advanced Roadmaps also includes a number of other smaller improvements that will make planning your work and communicating your plans even easier:

• Grouping: You can now group your timeline by Assignee, Project, Release and Sprint to better visualise your work in the manner relevant to your and your stakeholders;

• Colouring: Colouring options have been extended to Component, Label, Project, Status, and Team so that you can highlight the parts of your plan that matter the most; and

• Filtering: Finally, Advanced Roadmaps can now your plan filter by more fields (including new types of custom fields!). We’ve also significantly improved performance when using filters so that you can quickly answer any questions that may arise while you’re planning for your teams.

And more to come!

This is just the beginning! We have more in store for Advanced Roadmaps to help users share their plans more easily, plan future capacity with greater flexibility, and get started with planning for the first time.

We hope that our new Advanced Roadmaps feature helps you and your teams get even more out of Jira Software Cloud Premium.

[Dave Liao]

Happy to see filtering by custom field is a thing! I'm looking at a Roadmaps Plan in Cloud, but I still only see the normal built-in fields (e.g. Issue types, Components, etc.) but none of the custom fields I've associated to the Plan. Anyone else see something different?

[Sean Canton]

Wondering if it'll work with next-gen JIRA boards or not. 

[Lelis Murakami]

It is a nice move for Portfolio for Jira that will increase leadership adoption. Thanks.

[Joakim Platbarzdis]

I absolute love it so far. Great work!

[Steven Wathen]

Looks great, couple of early questions though that will stop me moving to it.

1. You used to be able to export the data from the "Scope" Report. Now that reports have been removed, can you still export the data? 

2. I noticed that issues without an estimate don't get put onto the roadmap? Portfolio used to use an average estimate (that you specified) for un-estimated issues, whats happened to that?

[Nishant Kumar]

Next gen support included in this release ?

[Josh Frank]

@Nishant Kumar @Sean Canton Currently Advanced Roadmaps only supports classic projects, although we are looking at how we can support next-gen projects in the future. 

[Ricky Aladort]

Custom fields can be added in the configure menu. Plans does not appear to work with next-gen projects.

[AndrewCorvesta]

Any timeline for JIRA server?

[Jason Kossen]

How well would this work when using a Kanban approach where being able to manage change requires the flexibility of Kanban but the need is still there to plan work in a more iterative / quarterly view? 

[André Myrbråten]

Where is the ticket for voting up support for next-gen? 

[Mara Dooley]

What about the Theme field and report? Has that been eliminated?

[Scott]

Very surprised this doesn’t work with next-gen.

[Dan]

Given the product is called advanced roadmaps its a bit disappointing that it doesn't support projects with roadmaps...

[Pete Morris]

Hi folks! Thanks to everyone for your feedback so far.

@Sean Canton , @Nishant Kumar, @Ricky Aladort , @André Myrbråten, @Scott , @Dan  

I'm so sorry for not living up to your expectations regarding supporting next-gen projects at launch. We are actively working to address this and we hope to have more to share with you soon. Until then, you will of course have the Roadmaps feature that is already built into next-gen projects. I'd love to learn more about how you use both next-gen and classic projects together, so please feel free to email me at pmorris@atlassian.com . I'll be more than happy to hear about any other concerns you have too.

As for some of the other questions:

@Dave_Liao - bit of a two step process here: you'll have to first add the custom fields to the plan via the plan configuration (cog next to the plan name, then "Custom fields" under Source data), then you need to show them in the Plan interface fields (the "..." next to the "Fields" heading in the table view, then select the fields you want to show). Hope that helps.

@Steven Wathen - export to csv will be coming back in the next few months. As for default estimates, we removed this feature from the improved interface but you can achieve a similar result (with much greater flexibility) by creating a new rule with our recently launched Jira Automation capabilities.

@Mara Dooley - themes are not present in the improved interface however you can achieve similar results using labels and the dashboard gadget "Pie chart". We'll be considering a new approach to understanding investment via themes/objectives in the future.

@Jason Kossen - we support both Scrum and Kanban teams. You can set your team's iteration to be a week long and use hour/day estimation methods. Perhaps give it a try and feel free to ask questions here if you'd like more information.

[Steven Wathen]

@Pete Morris Do you have any timescales for CSV export? Also, you mention about using automation for Jira to put "average" estimations against tickets. Do you mean we will have to write a value to the "story points" field on ticket creation? One good feature of portfolio is that you could leave the "story point" field for un-estimated tickets blank. That way we could update all un-estimated tickets simply by changing the one setting in portfolio. 

[Marjolein Veenendaal]

I like the new functionality, but I dislike the move of eliminating the standalone app. This move to premium makes Advanced Roadmaps essentially twice as expensive as it was ($7 surplus for the premium instead of the standard, where standalone it was $3.50 per user per month), and I already wasn't sure if it was worth it to begin with. The pricing per active Jira users does not seem fair, as it is mostly a tool Product Management will use, not all developers....

[Marko Sest]

thank you, it's great, but one question. Is there an option that the view (i.e. view settings) can be saved for everybody to see when they access the certain plan (i.e. default view?)

[Olivier Moteau]

Any timeline for JIRA server release?

Sorry, just seen it's live already. As per your description:

When you are ready, just head into your plan’s settings (accessed via the “…” next to the plan’s name) and enable the “improved interface”.

[Roald]

Was looking forward to improvements and just had a play around with this. Maybe it's our slightly complicated setup and/or the lack of actual information on the way it works, but this is still unusable for what I consider basic roadmap work.

I feel core underlying issues are not being resolved but worked around, and as one commenter above states it's only getting more expensive without resolving any of our problems I'm going to look around for alternatives.

[Pete Morris]

@Steven Wathen - I can't give an exact date for export to CSV, but if everything goes well then it should be in the next few months. And yes, I am referring to using automation rules to write a default value to the story points field. This has the added benefit of allowing you to see it elsewhere in Jira Software, rather than being an assumption that is only present within the calculation of a plan.

@Marko Sest  - No, not right now. But soon! We have a feature coming that will allow you to save multiple views to a plan and share those views with other users. This will be on a similar timeframe to export to CSV mentioned above.

@Roald  - Can you tell me a little bit more about what you're trying to achieve and what isn't working for you with the new interface? I'm happy to help.

[Roald]

@Pete Morris List is too long to put here, but a few quick points between Jira and Portfolio:

• Hierarchy support in issues is lacking (in general, more specifically I need Feature level between Epic and Story at minimum)
• Field/Screen setup per issue type is overcomplicated and does not always 'stick' once you start working with it (slightly better in Next-Gen but that has it's own limitations)
• Roadmap shows previous sprints when I specifically select only current and future sprints
• Progress indicators on Epics in roadmap are incorrect, they don't include items in done state (roadmap source is scrum board)
• Trying to work around the previous points I still haven't found a way to select issues based on a custom property and all descendants.
• For our purposes the roadmap presentation is unusable. Timeline should be sprints, rows should be issues (collapsible like it is now is fine), planning should be on features, resource/team totals should be visible per initiative/epic (rolled up), sprint (rolled up) and per issue (feature)
• Issues in our current sprint show up on the roadmap with start and end dates that don't line up with the sprint dates, and we don't use any dates on the issues.

Maybe I just don't understand how it works, but any documentation I can find refers to the old Portfolio almost exclusively, and even then it doesn't provide actual information on the underlying workings but only guides you through steps that I can mostly figure out myself.

Jira works fine for a small group of developer focused people, but using the same information for a wider (business) audience in a meaningful way is simply not workable.

[Deleted user]

Hi

I am an administrator on cloud version but i do not see "Plans" tab on jira software navigation. How to set it up?

Regards

Nupur

[Justin Kelley]

Absolutely love the upgrade, we're potentially replacing planning in airtable with this now that it covers the same grounds. 

One question though, what would it take to include past completed projects?  I tried to run a plan against 2019 to see how it all laid out and none of the completed projects are available to add.  I've already modified the field Completed Issues in the config and it seems to have no effect on the issue sources process.

[Josh Frank]

@[deleted] Are you a Portfolio for Jira Cloud customer (now Advanced Roadmaps)? Currently only existing Portfolio for Jira Cloud customers have access to this change and it will become available to all customers very soon via Jira Software Cloud Premium.