6. Working with your plans

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.

Ask the community

  1. 1. Installing Portfolio for Jira
  2. 2. Preparing your planning environment
  3. 3. Creating Portfolio plans
  4. 4. Managing your teams
  5. 5. Managing your releases
  6. 6. Working with your plans
  7. 7. Customizing your plans
  8. 8. Sharing your plans

Before you begin

Depending on how your organization is structured, the content on this page is meant for Portfolio for Jira administrators or Portfolio plan owners.

To help you set your teams up for success, we've prepared this getting started guide that discusses how to set up Portfolio for Jira with your existing Jira instance.

The guide discusses the typical end-to-end path that users and administrators may find themselves taking part in when using Portfolio for Jira. You'll also find high-level content on Portfolio concepts, as well as some recommendations and optional steps you can consider, as you flesh out your plan.

Working with plans

The content in this section tackles the functionality differences between scheduling issues in plans with the improved interface (versions 3.0 and later) and live plans (versions 2.0 to 2.27) .

One significant functionality difference between plans with the improved interface and live plans is how the scheduler implements data changes in your plan:

  • In plans with the improved interface, the scheduler still works out the schedule for you, but does not directly implement these changes in your plan. Instead, the scheduler surfaces these changes as suggestions, and you're given the option whether or not to accept these changes.
  • In live plans, you don't see how the scheduler physically works out your timeline. Ultimately, you're only given the resulting schedule in your plan.

Check out Changes in the improved interface to learn more about the significant functionality differences across these types of plans.

However, because of these differences, we recommend that you jump to one of the following sections, based on the type of plan you're using:

Working with plans with the improved interface

Here are some pages, to orient yourself with the look and feel of plans with the improved interface.

While planning work for your teams, you may need to do any of the following tasks, and not necessarily in the following order:


TaskDescription
1 Configuring your plan You'll need to have the Portfolio for Jira user permission to configure the settings of a plan. Keep in mind how your teams work in your organization, so you can choose the appropriate options for the following settings: scheduling, issue sources, custom fields, permissions, and scenarios.
2 Viewing issues in your plan

When planning work, you're likely to be managing multiple issues that span multiple projects. It's easy to lose track of your work at one point or another, when you're across multiple work streams.

The roadmap view of your plan lets you see all the work that's relevant to you. With the improved interface, you can use the different elements in this view, so you can focus on only the relevant details.

3 Managing issues in your plan

With your plan up and running, you most likely will already have issues in it, based on the issue sources selected. As you go about your work, you may need to create more issuesedit multiple issues in bulk, or even use scenarios.

4 Scheduling issues

Take advantage of the hybrid planning approach in the improved interface: manual scheduling and automatic scheduling.

In the improved interface, you can manually schedule the issues in your plan by dragging and dropping the issues in the timeline accordingly. You can also manually enter target dates to schedule the issues.

You can also make Portfolio auto-schedule your plan for you — Portfolio will take into account several issue details like estimates, sprints, and releases, and then suggests how the issues could be scheduled in your plan. You then have the option to accept or discard these changes.

See Scheduling issues and Auto-scheduling issues to know more about manual scheduling and automatic scheduling work in the improved interface.

5 Managing dependencies When planning work for your teams, it helps to monitor the dependencies across the issues in the plan. This helps you spot any issues that are blocking the progress of other issues, and ultimately helps you create a realistic schedule for your teams.


Working with live plans

Here are some pages, to orient yourself with the look and feel of live plans.

While planning work for your teams, you may need to do any of the following tasks, and not necessarily in the following order:


TaskDescription
1 Configuring plan settings

Similarly, you'll need to have the Portfolio for Jira user permission to configure the settings of a plan. You'll also need to keep in mind how your teams work in your organization, so you can choose the appropriate options for the following settings: stages and skills, scenarios, scheduling, working hours and days, issue sources, custom fields, and commit options.

2 Scheduling issues in the timeline

The schedule is one of core capabilities in a live plan. The scheduler will automatically assign teams to issues, take dependencies and priorities into account, and generate a realistic forecast.

The timeline view shows forecasted release dates, and allows you to break things down based on projects, teams, and team members.

See Scheduling behavior and Using the timeline to start scheduling issues in your plan.

3

Managing the scope of your plan

Live plans feature a seamless integration with Jira. Changes that happen in the selected agile boards and projects will be reflected in your plan in Portfolio for Jira. It also works the other way around; the new "review changes" dialog provides you with a full view of changes that have been made before committing them back to Jira.

See the following pages to start managing the scope of your plan: Configuring the scope viewUsing the scope view, and Creating and deleting issues

4

Monitoring the status of your plan

You can track the progress of Jira issues directly from your Portfolio plan.

When you connect a plan with your boards and projects, Portfolio for Jira can detect the estimation unit of these issues. Once your plan is created, a progress bar is displayed for individual issues. Parent issues will display an aggregated progress bar, corresponding to the individual progress of all the child issues. You can also check the progress of releases in the release view.

See Tracking progress and status for more details.

5

Managing dependencies

When planning work for your teams, it helps to monitor the dependencies across the issues in the plan.

In live plans, you can view dependencies in your plan via the light blue bars that appear either at the beginning or the end of an issue. You can also add dependencies via the scope details view for each issue.

Best practices

Best practice to considerIn plans with the improved interface...In live plans...
Make sure to set sensible dates

Any clashing dates will be flagged in plans with the improved interface. You'll be shown a warning icon for each clashing date, over which you can hover and see what's causing the warning. As a rule of thumb, make sure to set dates that aren't clashing with each other. 

In the improved interface, you can use a wide variety of dates. To keep the experience simple, target dates are used by default. To use other date fields, you'll need to add these to your plan first.

See Overview and Scheduling work for more details.

Any clashing dates will be flagged in your live plan. As a rule of thumb, make sure to set dates that aren't clashing with each other.

In live plans, you have a wide variety of dates that you can choose to use in your plan.

Sharing plan data to stakeholders

In the improved interface, you can share a read-only view of your roadmap to your stakeholders. Any view settings previously configured will also be used in the read-only view that you're sharing.

Similarly, the generated view will contain data that's only true and accurate for that exact moment. Plans with the improved interface also contain dynamic data generated from Jira, so the view that you shared yesterday may already be outdated today.

In live plans, you can use different reports to share data about your plan to stakeholders.

Depending on what you need to share, note that the generated report will contain data that's only true and accurate for that exact moment. A live plan contains dynamic data generated from Jira, so the report that you generated yesterday may already be outdated today.

Saving changes to Jira

The dialog for reviewing and saving changes to Jira may have different layouts. But as a best practice, we recommend to regularly save the changes in your plan to Jira.

Remember that your plan is a sandbox — whatever changes you make are only saved in your plan. But these changes won't be visible to your teams working in Jira until you save these in Jira.

For plans with the improved interface, see Saving changes in Jira for more details. For live plans, click the Uncommitted changes button that appears next to the plan name, then proceed to review and commit the changes to Jira.


Last modified on Sep 6, 2019

Was this helpful?

Yes
No
Provide feedback about this article
Powered by Confluence and Scroll Viewport.