Creating Plans and Dependencies in Advanced Roadmaps [Atlassian University Live webinar]

Ben Thoma
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 8, 2021

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As part of an ongoing series, Atlassian University offered this free webinar to strengthen your Atlassian product skills and learn directly from Atlassian experts.

In this webinar, we explored how to create plans in Advanced Roadmaps and saw how we can preview changes without affecting our underlying Jira data. We also saw how we can set dependencies and report on those dependencies in Advanced Roadmaps.

Together we:

  • created plans in Advanced Roadmaps
  • understood the Advanced Roadmaps sandbox
  • created and reported dependencies

 

This webinar is intended for anyone responsible for setting up a Jira Cloud project including program managers, project managers, product owners, product managers, development team managers, and scrum masters.

Watch the recorded webinar and use the comments below to ask more questions related to Advanced Roadmaps.

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Jimmy Seddon
Community Leader
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October 8, 2021

This sounds really awesome @Ben Thoma!  Thank you!

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Thuy Nguyen October 18, 2021

This is great, thank you !

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Eric Connelly October 19, 2021

What are all the road map tools and what is high level differences between them?

Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 20, 2021

Road map tools?  Are you referring to Roadmap that comes with Jira or Advanced Roadmaps that comes with Premium?

Friendly Giant October 19, 2021

Hello Ben, my question from the 100+ batch did not get answered by Jay....so here goes

 

Hello Jay, in your expereince what have you felt better about : work bottom-up or top-down....

 

✨💐

Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 20, 2021

I'm assuming you mean bottom-up: starting with the stories and the agile teams to the epics (or whatever your org calls the next level up) and so, versus Top-Down where management sets the vision and creates the top level of the hierarchy all the way down to the agile teams.

I love this answer.  It's the answer to every question in computing.  Are you ready?  It depends.  That's right, it depends.

It depends on your organization's adoption of agile.  Do you work in "Sprints" and therefore are agile, or has your organization really adopted agile and have a framework that everyone in the organization subscribes to.  If the agile teams are really the only agile people in the org, then you're probably better off with a bottom up approach and you probably won't go much higher than Features or Epics.  If on the other hand, leadership has embraced agility and everyone from the top down is truly working in an agile manner, then a top-down approach might be best.  The leadership sets the vision for the org and passes it down to the business owners.  

There isn't a straight answer.  It really does depend.  If you're not really agile, and working in "Sprints" doesn't make you agile, then working from the bottom up can be effective in getting the rest of the org to adopt an agile mindset.  

I hope this helps.

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Friendly Giant October 22, 2021

Thank you @Jay Jarman  💐 this is a helpful answer and i will check-in with you afte ra few months 

We have teams that work Agile and i will start working with teams on Operational execution who are willing to get Agile.

The company choose Align to support us getting there, and while we have points to resolve in Testing i trust we can build a a good team.

The top of the organisation is not yet Agile, but the C-level Change Officer is working on that.

Have a Fantastic Friday ✨✨

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Ryan Wolfe October 19, 2021
  1. Can dependencies be inforced without setting up automation? What I mean is a task that depends on another task to be completed first, can't be started till that one is done.
  2. Can you have multiple projects represented here? What would be the best way to have multiple projects set up under a single initiative and/or epic?
  3. Can dependencies be set up at different statuses in a workflow or only after they have been closed? Is it also based on statuses or resolution?
David Wuth
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October 19, 2021

These are great questions. From what I can see, the dependencies in Advanced Roadmaps are just a visual representation of the issue linking feature in Jira. In other words, the dependency shows an issue that has link to another issue either a a Blocks or Blocked By type of link. That implies a Finish/Start dependency model, based on the close/done event of the issue. Definitely not a robust dependency mapping feature like many project managers may be used to seeing in tools such as MS Project.

Q1 - I would love if this available without automation as part of the standard Jira product. Unfortunately the best solution I have found is to create a workflow validator (using JMWE addon) to prevent the transition of an issue based on the status of another issue.

Q2 - I can state for certain that Advanced Roadmaps supports multiple projects under a single initiative. And, you can have an issue in Project A block and issue in Project B, thus creating the dependency link.

HOWEVER... and that is a BIG HOWEVER, it is not as clean as you may want. You can create Initiative 1 under Project A, then have Epic 1 from Project A and Epic 1 from Project B as children under Initiative 1. Unfortunately, Jira does not current support releases/fixversions shared across projects so there is no way to tag Initiative 1 to the release/fixversion of Project B. 

Q3 - As I noted in my first paragraph, the dependencies appear to be very basic, based on the Issue Link field. But, I would love to hear from Atlassian on this question and future enhancements.

Anastasiya Fomin October 19, 2021

Hello Jay and Ben - Thank you for the webinar! What is the maximum number of issues that Advanced Roadmaps can show in a plan/program? It used to be up to 2,000 issues on server. Has this limit increased since?

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Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 20, 2021

I will have to ask the product team about that.

Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 20, 2021

This link will answer your question in detail but it appears to be 5,000

https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/limits-on-plan-size-in-advanced-roadmaps/

David Wuth
Rising Star
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October 19, 2021

when will Advanced Roadmaps get more granular permission levels? We need more than just edit/view for the entire plan. Would like to set permissions on views, ability to post updates to Jira, change dependencies, etc.

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Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 20, 2021

I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that but you can submit a feature request to the dev team.

Katharina Jasi October 19, 2021

Hi everybody! Thanks for the webinar. It was great! 
I need to plan multiple teams on multiple projects. Has anybody experience with that? How to plan the same ressources on different projects and to see when someone is overplanned?

Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 20, 2021

Cloud or Server?

Server - Check out Shared Teams in the documentation.  That should help

Cloud - You can still create Shared Teams and adjust the capacity for the team but you can't for individual team members.  They are in the process of integrating Advanced Roadmaps with Teams and you'll have a lot more control.

David Wuth
Rising Star
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October 20, 2021

@Ben Thoma Will Atlassian be answering the questions being asked here?

Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 20, 2021

Yes, but anyone in the community can.

Simon Hogfress October 21, 2021

When will the UI & functionality of Jira Data Centre be bought in sync with cloud?

There's a lot of new features (things like dependencies as lines on plans shown in this webinar) that are better in cloud that DC customers do not get.

Jay Jarman
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
October 25, 2021

It depends on the feature.  DC/Server has a Program and I don't think Cloud will ever have that.  With that said though, the Cloud team is working on features to give you the same functionality.

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