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If you're using the improved planning interface, this page is for you. If you're using live plans, head to Live plans (versions 2.0 to 2.27).

Before you begin

For Portfolio for Jira to capture the latest data from Jira, you'll need to organize your work into what we call issue sources. The issue details that come from these issue sources will be used to create the ideal schedule for your teams. The issues can be scheduled across sprints, months, even years.

These are the issue sources into which you'll have to organize your work in Jira:

  • Boards: A board displays issues from one or more projects, giving you a flexible way of viewing, managing, and reporting on work in progress. There are two types of boards in Jira:
    • Scrum board — for teams that plan their work in sprints
    • Kanban board — for teams that focus on managing and constraining their work-in-progress
  • Projects: A project in Jira is a collection of issues that is defined according to your organization's requirements. For example, it can be a software development project, a marketing campaign, or a website enhancement request system.
  • Filters: Your board's filter is a Jira issue filter (a JQL query) that specifies which issues are included on your board. For example, your board may include issues from multiple projects, or from only one project, or from a particular component of a project.

    Note that only the administrator of a board or a user with the Portfolio for Jira administrator global permission can configure a board's filter.

Out of the three (3) issue sources, we recommend that you use Scrum boards. This gives you the ability to manage sprints from those boards, plan the capacity of future sprints, and assign issues to sprints — all directly from your plan.

What is a plan?

A plan is a roadmap of all the work that you manage in Jira. Work can be anything you're involved in — it can be the issues your teams are working on, the releases your teams have committed to delivering, and more.

Portfolio for Jira can consume these work items from Jira, and then uses a scheduler to create a realistic schedule for your teams. This resulting schedule is based on relevant issue details that are logged in both your plan and in Jira.

This is how a plan looks like, with the improved interface:

1

Configure plan settings, like the name of your plan, or the issue sources your plan is using. You can also delete a plan from the settings icon.

2

Navigate to different views of your plan:

  • Roadmap, to see the issues in your plan, including issue details, and how these issues are scheduled for your team to work on.
  • Teams, to configure and manage the teams that are working across all the issues in your plan.
  • Releases, to configure and manage the releases associated with all the issues in your plan.

See Working with plans to know more about these views in your plan.

3

Filter work in your plan, so you're viewing only the work you need to see. You can filter your work by projects, releases, teams, and other filters.

You can also choose to view only the issues that are scheduled for a certain duration in your plan:

  • 3M: for the next 3 months, starting from the current day
  • 1Y: for a year, starting from the current day
  • Fit: for displaying issues to fit the width of the timeline, based on the earliest start date, earliest release, latest end date, and latest release of all issues in the plan. Note that any filters that have been configured in the roadmap will also be taken into account when using this setting.
  • Custom: within a particular date range that you can set

See Viewing work and Filtering issues for more details.

4

The different sections in the roadmap view of your plan, where you can view and work on issues accordingly:

  • Scope, which displays the issues in the plan according to hierarchy levels. Expand a hierarchy level to see the issues of that level — and for each issue, the issue count (for each row), issue type icon, issue key, and issue summary are displayed. You can also create an issue in this section.
  • Fields, which displays the fields added to a plan as columns. Each column contains the corresponding issue details, as well as the corresponding issue actions.
  • Timeline, which displays issues in schedule bars, and the size of each bar corresponds to its start and end dates. You can schedule these issues by dragging and dropping the bars themselves. You can also adjust the start and end dates by dragging the corresponding end of the bar accordingly.

See Working with plans for more details.

5

Customize the view of the timeline, to make it easier for your audience to consume your plan. The following view settings are available:

  • Group by: Group your issues into separate swimlanes by assignee, project, team, and more.
  • Color by: Color your issues by status, team, label, and more.

See Customizing view settings for more information.

6

Perform actions for your plan:

  • Auto-schedule your plan, to automatically schedule the issues in your plan, based on issue details from Jira, like assigned sprints, assigned releases, dependencies, dates, and more.
  • Share your roadmap, to share a read-only view of your roadmap to relevant stakeholders in your team. As an option, you can choose to embed the URL, so your consumers can embed your roadmap as needed. See Sharing roadmaps for more information.
  • Review changes in your plan, so you can select which changes you want to save in Jira, as well as which ones to discard from your plan.

As a best practice, make a habit of regularly reviewing and saving your changes in Jira. This way, you can inform stakeholders, keep the work items in Jira up to date, and ensure that your teams are ready to execute on your plan — all in real time.

Check out this video to see how to navigate a Portfolio plan in action.

Last modified on Mar 25, 2020

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