Best practice for start/end dates in Advanced Roadmaps

[Darrel Jackson]

I'm starting to roll out Advanced Roadmaps in our organisation. It's a relatively mature Jira instance so it has a number of custom fields for start/end dates depending on the context.

Are there any best practices for selecting which date fields should be used for start date / end date in Advanced Roadmaps? When I create a brand new plan it defaults to "Start Date" (custom field 12010) and "Due Date" (the in-built field).

How do others have this set up?

Are people tracking planned dates and actual dates separately? I'm thinking that's not very relevant when planning using scaled agile techniques.

[Darrel Jackson · Accepted solution]

I'll answer my own question after 16 months of usage.

Best to use Start Date and Due Date. No need for Target/Planned Start and Target/Planned End as any Start Date/Due Date in the future is "target" and any Start Date/Du Date in the past is "actual".

[Michelle Schmidt]

We're a mature instance but just getting started with Advanced Roadmaps.  We are using Planned Start (custom) and Due Date.

[elizabeth_jones]

I have custom fields for Target Start, Target End, which is what drives my roadmap gantt chart. I also use start, due date for tracking actuals to plan. 

[Ari Romanenko]

Hey @elizabeth_jones 

can you share a bit more on your setup? We are trying to do the same but it seems Warnings are not working on such setup. We want to see a warn when Start date is later than Target start date.

[Erin Quick-Laughlin]

@elizabeth_jones - we have some teams that follow the same pattern, but I'm curious why we even need Target Start & Target End - what's the value prop?  What does it help improve in your company?

[Michelle Schmidt]

A Target/Planned Start Date is needed for the Gantt chart, which some people love for sharing as a visualization with Business partners.

Some teams enjoy using the Target/Planned Start Date for managing the backlog - thinking of starting on time helps finish on time, and also helps sort through the clutter of things that don't need to be started until, say, next month.

[Erin Quick-Laughlin]

I forgot about expectation setting with externals.    Definitely need a separate storage for that.  ;)