Start date for portfolio plan

[Khawar Shahzad]

I am in process of migrating our projects from manual way of planning timelines to automatic way provided by JIRA/Portolio.

However, after creating plan on portfolio, the start date of plan is when it is created on portfolio. I am not able to update start date, when project was actually started.

I understand that portfolio automatically calculates start/end dates of features based on resource strength, working days and estimates etc. And actually, I also want it to be calculated automatically.

However, I am not able to update first start date of plan. The project was started 1 month ago, and portfolio is shows it as started on 16 Aug, hence end date is also delayed (1 month later, than expected).

How we can update start date of project?

[Thomas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Khawar Shahzad,

The Portfolio for JIRA plan is a forward planning tool that schedules what needs to be done according to the available resources and the issue sources.

There is obviously nothing to "Estimate" in the past as things already happened and it should be reflected in the JIRA issues.

For example, Your project consists of 20 epics, 5 of which were completed in the last month. A Portfolio plan would schedule the remaining 15 epics.

If you believe some issues are being put on the schedule but are actually already done I would advise checking the issue status to ensure completed issues have a "Done" (green) status.

Cheers,

Thomas

[Khawar Shahzad]

Hi @Thomas

Thank you for your helpful response.

I understand that we always plan of ahead, but migrating only future epics/stories on portfolio means, I can generate reports from portfolio only for new epics/stories, and then will have to combine it manually with reports of older epics/stories (generated from older software I use) to make consolidated reports for management.

This will be nightmare for long term projects when we have many stories/epics already completed (our projects are normally 6 -8  months of duration for first release), and migrating to Portfolio for remaining.

I wouldn't be able to get rid of my older software, I'll have to use it in combinition with Portfolio. Then it's better to keep on using older software, instead of migrating to Portfolio.

Also, sometimes we decide to start a project on some specific future date, but then delay it further, due to availability of resources or any other reason. Again in that case, we wouldn't be able to delay start date on Portfolio.

What I don't understand is why changing start date is not available. User should be able to at least provide start date, and they Portfolio can take it further to plan it.

[Thomas]

While the schedule view and calculated data concerns only the future, the scope table and reports can include closed issues. The completion date filter will help you decide how far in the past should we go looking for completed issues.

"Released" versions will remain in Portfolio, archived versions will not show in Portfolio so as any issue assigned to an archived version.

On the other side of things, if you are looking at pushing things later (due to a delay or not), using the release start date (see releases tab) and issue "earliest start date" (You can set it on a parent issue and impact all children).

[Shannon S]

Khawar,

It is not currently possible to change the plan start date in Portfolio, but it does appear that we have a lot of feature requests for this. The following request has the most votes so I recommend that you watch it and vote on it to help show that you would be interested in such a feature.

• JPOSERVER-429

When using the project as the issue source, the start date of the plan will be when the plan was calculated.

If you were to change the issue source to be a JIRA Software board, the plan will start with the first Sprint start date.  

Let us know if you have any questions.

Kind Regards,
Shannon

[Khawar Shahzad]

Hi @Shannon S

Thank you for confirmation on non-availability of this featue. I have voted on above feature request.

However, as per my understanding this feature is so obvious that it shouldn't need any voting.

[Michel van Leeuwen]

I changed the source to the Jira board, but stil the start date is the day the plan was calculated. I would like to have the start date to be the first sprint date. How to solve? Currently; portfolio is useless.

[Claire Buckley]

I agree with you.  I get that whoever built Portfolio for JIRA saw it as a forward planning tool, but it would be good to see what was done before, progress by Epic or by Release % complete and its position along a timeline / gantt chart.

I have to tell my client when a certain segment of epics will be ready at current velocity and it would be great to see the story roll up into Epics and see progress and projected timelines based on issue count or story points or time estimations.

[Ethan Shvartzman]

To Khawar's original point, the inability to set a project start date (a basic feature in every project management tool) makes it impossible to switch to Portfolio for that task. It's also incorrect to say that the past doesn't matter or that using the work around of earliest start date makes sense when planning just because the "create date" is being used as plan start date.  IMHO this is a huge flaw in the product which renders it fairly useless at least for planning purposes.

[r.ramesh]

We too are dumb-struck on how can a Plan-create date be considered as Project start date ?
I put in around 10 Epics which have around 150-170 tasks in there hoping that I will change the Scheduled start date via some settings later on !
This is such a big disappointment :(

Any ideas on how everybody else is doing their project timelines estimation ?