Creating plans
This page refers to the usage of the improved planning interface in Portfolio for Jira (version 3.0 and later). If you're using a Portfolio for Jira live plan (any version from 2.0 to 2.27), refer to the documentation in this section.
Any plans you create in Portfolio for Jira will have the improved planning interface enabled by default.
Sample plan, with the improved interface
If you prefer to use the layout of live plans (any version from 2.0 to 2.27), you'll need to disable the improved interface in each of your plans. See Setting up the planning environment to know more.
If a plan becomes too large, this can cause your Jira instance to time out. To prevent this, you can consider creating multiple plans and spreading the work across these plans, or you can remove certain issues from the issue sources that you've connected to the plan.
Note the following loading limits in a plan:
- Absolute issue limit: The number of issues you can load into a plan, which is 5000.
- Hierarchy issue limit: The number of issues that can be displayed for each hierarchy level in the plan, which is 2000. This limit only applies when you're creating a plan; you will not be able to create a plan if the total number of issues exceeds 2000 for any of the hierarchy levels.
- Project limit: The number of projects you can load into a plan, which is 100. This limit only applies when you're creating a plan; you will not be able to create a plan if the total number of projects in the plan exceeds 100.
- Team limit: The number of teams you can access via shared team settings. The limit for the number of teams that a plan can directly display is 50. If you have more than 50 teams, some teams won't be displayed directly in the shared team settings page. To find teams that are not displaying, enter the team name in the search box.
Creating a plan
- In Jira, go to Portfolio (in header) > Create. The 'Create' dialog will be displayed.
- Select Plan > Create.
- Give your plan a name.
- Select one of the privacy options from the privacy drop-down:
- No restrictions (default option) – all Portfolio users can view and access the plan
- Private – only the creator of the plan can view, access, and edit the plan
- Click Next.
- Choose the issue sources (boards, projects, filters) that you want to use for your plan.
- 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 Portfolio plan.
- If you choose a Scrum board as one of the issue sources in your plan, you'll also be asked to choose how you want to estimate your issues. We recommend that you use story points.
- See What is a Portfolio plan to know more about issue sources.
- Click Next.
- Choose the releases that are relevant to your work, then click Next.
- By choosing the relevant releases, the issues assigned to these releases will be included in the plan. Any issues that are not assigned to any releases will also be included in the plan.
- You only need to perform this step if there are existing releases in Jira, that are associated with the selected issue sources. If there are no existing releases, all issues from the issue sources will be included in the plan by default.
- You can choose to accept the suggested the teams that you want to include in your plan, or you can do either one of the following:
- Configure the settings of the teams: agile method (Scrum or Kanban) and weekly capacity
Note that for plans that have boards as issue sources, Portfolio for Jira will suggest the velocity for the team. The suggested velocity will be based on past performance, i.e. if the team previously completed any sprints in the corresponding boards. - Delete a team that you don't need to include in your plan, by clicking more (
) > Delete.
You can also add, configure, and delete teams from within a plan. See Managing teams for more details.
- Configure the settings of the teams: agile method (Scrum or Kanban) and weekly capacity
Click Next.
- Confirm the issues that you want to include in your plan by selecting the corresponding checkboxes.
By default, all the issues are selected. Filter the issues by project, issue source, issue key, or issue summary as needed. - When you've marked all the issues you need, click Done.
For newly created plans and existing plans where the improved interface is enabled for the first time, the following will take place by default:
- The plan will display issues starting from the highest hierarchy level that has at least 2 issues. If the plan has at least 2 issues at the highest initiative level, then it will display issues starting with initiatives.
- If the plan has only 1 issue at any level above epics, then the issues will be displayed starting at the epic level.
- The target start date, target end date, and status columns will be displayed in the fields section.
- The issues are displayed 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.
- You can change these details and settings any time moving forward. See Displaying issue details for more information.
Updating the settings of a plan
You can update any of these settings at any time.
| Rename a plan | Hover over the name > enter a new name > click Enter. |
| Configure issue sources | Before you update the issue sources of a plan, note that changing the issue sources will affect the scope, releases, and teams in your plan. See Issue sources for more details. Any releases that have been created and saved to Jira will be also selected by default.
|
| Delete a plan | Click settings ( |
