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

[Ben Thoma]

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.

[Jimmy Seddon]

This sounds really awesome @Ben Thoma!  Thank you!

[Thuy Nguyen]

This is great, thank you !

[Eric Connelly]

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

[Jay Jarman]

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

[Friendly Giant]

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]

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.

[Friendly Giant]

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 ✨✨

[Ryan Wolfe]

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]

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]

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?

[Jay Jarman]

I will have to ask the product team about that.

[Jay Jarman]

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]

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.

[Jay Jarman]

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

[Katharina Jasi]

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]

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]

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

[Jay Jarman]

Yes, but anyone in the community can.

[Simon Hogfress]

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]

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.

[Roland Stoll]

Advanced Roadmaps is really a very cool and mighty tool - I already read a lot in the last months - since last week I am "allowed" by my company to test it... :)

here are some questions I discovered:

1. capacity planning
looks actually very native, only set up days/story points in the team settings, and then have this little indicator in the timeline views... and yes, click on a sprint, and you get some details...

I would like to see a more flexible way of capacity planning, e.g. an ui to set the capacity of each team mate for every sprint... sure, you have an average pace for the team, but this changes each sprint (due to vacations, workshops, etc.) - would be great to store this individually for each sprint and each team mate...

even better: team mates can store their availability/capacity themselves! kinda calendar view, where you (as a team mate) can set days/half-days/etc. where you are unavailable...

2. unassigned issues
every issues created in a Jira Scrum/Kanban board (epic, story, task, bug, etc.) must be assigned firstly to the team - is there any way to automate this? e.g. based on the issue sources?