Planning work
Once your plan is up and running, you're just about ready to plan more work for your teams. Most likely, your plan will already have issues in it, based on the issue sources you've previously selected.
You may also need to create more issues, to accommodate high-level work as they come. In the new experience, we're making it more straightforward and intuitive for you to create issues directly in your plan.
Note that at any point in time during planning, you may just be planning high-level work — and that's fine. This essentially means that during high-level planning, it's typical to have placeholder estimates, and even skip specifying issue details, like assignees and target dates. Your teams can define more accurate values for these details later on.
Also, note that it's easy to lose focus when you're planning work across multiple projects, releases, teams, and other factors. We recommend you filter the work in your plans, so you can focus on a specific part of your work, as needed. See Viewing work for more details.
Creating issues
Before creating issues, make sure that you've already done both tasks:
- created the initiative issue type in at least one of the projects that's being used in your plan
- configured the hierarchy levels of your plan, as needed
Otherwise, some of the issue types won't be available to use. See Configuring initiatives and other hierarchy levels for more details.
You can create issues directly in your plan without having to jump back to Jira, and there are several ways to do this in the new experience:
- Create a child issue of an issue at a specific hierarchy level
- Create an issue of the same hierarchy level
- Create an issue at any hierarchy level
Also, note that the default duration for issues would depend on the timeframe in which you're viewing the plan. You can always edit the duration after the issue is created.
- 3M: 1 week
- 1Y: 1 month
- Fit: The default duration depends on the date range of the issues in the timeline, which affects the width of the issues in the timeline. If the width fit is small, then the default duration could perhaps be a week or a month.
- Custom: The default duration depends on the duration that you set between the start and end dates. If you set a short period of time, then the default duration would be shorter as well.
Creating a child issue of an issue
A plan typically contains issues coming from multiple issue sources, such as boards, projects, or filters. As a best practice, it would help you plan work and create issues more efficiently if you keep in mind the issue source, and the parent issue of the issue you're creating. This helps you create child issues of issues across multiple issue sources, where it makes most sense.
Creating a child issue of an issue
To create a child issue of an issue:
- In the scope section of your plan, go to the parent issue for the issue you want to create.
- Hover on the parent issue > click + > select the hierarchy level for the issue you're creating. This will add a row for the new issue, right below the parent issue.
- In the new row, select the issue type for the new issue > select the corresponding project.
- Give the new issue a name, then click Enter.
- If already known, specify other issue details, like assignee, team, estimate, sprint, release, and target dates.
In the roadmap view of your plan, above the timeline section, click Review changes. The 'Review changes' dialog will display, with all changes selected by default.
While reviewing your changes, perform the following as needed:
- To view multiple changes, expand the corresponding item in the 'What changed' column.
- With all the checkboxes already selected by default, clear the ones for the changes you do not want to save in Jira. While these changes won't be saved in Jira, these will still exist in your Portfolio plan.
- Select the checkboxes of the changes you want to save in Jira, then click Save selected changes in Jira.
- To discard any changes, select the checkboxes of these changes, then click Discard selected changes. These changes will then be discarded from your plan, and the values will revert to the ones currently saved in Jira.
Creating an issue of the same hierarchy level
You can also create a sibling issue — sibling issues are issues of the same hierarchy level.
Creating an issue of the same hierarchy level
To create an issue of the same hierarchy level:
- In the scope section of your plan, find an issue of the same hierarchy level of the sibling issue you want to create.
- Hover on the issue > click + > select the same hierarchy level. This will add a row for the new issue, right below the issue you'd referenced.
- In the new row, select the corresponding project.
- Give the new issue a name, then click Enter.
- If already known, specify other issue details, like assignee, team, estimate, sprint, release, and target dates.
In the roadmap view of your plan, above the timeline section, click Review changes. The 'Review changes' dialog will display, with all changes selected by default.
While reviewing your changes, perform the following as needed:
- To view multiple changes, expand the corresponding item in the 'What changed' column.
- With all the checkboxes already selected by default, clear the ones for the changes you do not want to save in Jira. While these changes won't be saved in Jira, these will still exist in your Portfolio plan.
- Select the checkboxes of the changes you want to save in Jira, then click Save selected changes in Jira.
- To discard any changes, select the checkboxes of these changes, then click Discard selected changes. These changes will then be discarded from your plan, and the values will revert to the ones currently saved in Jira.
Creating an issue at any hierarchy level
If you're planning high-level work and just want to create issues fast, you can choose to create issues at any hierarchy level. This is helpful for when you have some issues to create, but you can't connect these to parent issues just yet.
Creating an issue at any hierarchy level
To create an issue at any hierarchy level:
- In the scope section of your plan, click + Create issue.
- Select the hierarchy level for the issue. This will create a new issue at the bottom of the scope section, along with other issues that don't have parent issues.
- Give the new issue a name, and click Enter.
- Specify the corresponding issue details as needed:
- Issue type, which is necessary when you have multiple issue types mapped to the story level
- Issue source, for when your plan has multiple issue sources, i.e. boards, projects, and filters
- If already known, specify other issue details, like assignee, team, estimate, sprint, release, and target dates.
In the roadmap view of your plan, above the timeline section, click Review changes. The 'Review changes' dialog will display, with all changes selected by default.
While reviewing your changes, perform the following as needed:
- To view multiple changes, expand the corresponding item in the 'What changed' column.
- With all the checkboxes already selected by default, clear the ones for the changes you do not want to save in Jira. While these changes won't be saved in Jira, these will still exist in your Portfolio plan.
- Select the checkboxes of the changes you want to save in Jira, then click Save selected changes in Jira.
- To discard any changes, select the checkboxes of these changes, then click Discard selected changes. These changes will then be discarded from your plan, and the values will revert to the ones currently saved in Jira.
Removing an issue from a plan
You can remove an issue from a plan via several methods, depending on whether you're using the current plans or the new planning experience.
Removing an issue in current plans
You can remove issues from a plan by doing one of the following methods:
| 1 | Removing issues from the plan directly from the scope table |
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| 2 | Accessing the 'Create plan' wizard, and removing the issues from the scope of your plan | This only works for issues that have already been committed to Jira, which essentially means the issues already exist in your Jira instance.
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| 3 | Reverting the issues you've just created in your plan, before committing these changes in Jira |
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Removing an issue in the new planning experience
We're still iterating on how best to remove issues from plans in the new experience. At this time, you can remove issues doing one of the following methods:
| 1 | Discarding the issues you've just created in your plan, before saving these changes in Jira |
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| 2 | Accessing the 'Create plan' wizard, and removing the issues from the scope of your plan | This only works for issues that have already been committed to Jira, which essentially means the issues already exist in your Jira instance.
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Linking an issue to a parent issue
To link an issue to a parent issue, drag and drop an issue to its parent issue in the scope section. Note that you can only link an issue to a parent issue of the corresponding hierarchy level that you've configured for your plan. This means that if you've configured epics as the parent issues of stories, then you can only link a story issue to an epic issue.
To link an issue to a parent issue:
- In the scope section, find the issue that you want to link to a parent issue.
- Drag and drop the issue to the parent issue of the corresponding hierarchy level.
In the roadmap view of your plan, above the timeline section, click Review changes. The 'Review changes' dialog will display, with all changes selected by default.
While reviewing your changes, perform the following as needed:
- To view multiple changes, expand the corresponding item in the 'What changed' column.
- With all the checkboxes already selected by default, clear the ones for the changes you do not want to save in Jira. While these changes won't be saved in Jira, these will still exist in your Portfolio plan.
- Select the checkboxes of the changes you want to save in Jira, then click Save selected changes in Jira.
- To discard any changes, select the checkboxes of these changes, then click Discard selected changes. These changes will then be discarded from your plan, and the values will revert to the ones currently saved in Jira.
Deleting an issue
You cannot delete issues directly from a plan, if these issues have already been saved in Jira. You'll need to delete the issue from Jira, and to do this, you'll need the 'delete issue' project permission.
See Removing an issue from a plan to know how to delete issues that haven't been saved in Jira yet.