Working with your plans
- Installing Advanced Roadmaps
- Preparing your planning environment
- Creating your plans
- Managing your teams
- Managing your releases
- Working with your plans
- Customizing your plans
- Sharing your plans
Before you begin
Depending on how your organization is structured, the content on this page is meant for Advanced Roadmaps admins and plan owners.
The guide discusses the typical end-to-end path that users and administrators may find themselves taking part in when using features of Advanced Roadmaps. You'll also find high-level content on concepts, as well as some recommendations and optional steps you can consider, as you flesh out your plans.
Working with plans
The content in this section tackles the functionality differences between scheduling issues in plans with the improved interface and live plans.
One significant functionality difference between the plan types is on how the scheduler implements data changes in your plan:
- In plans with the improved interface, the scheduler 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 can choose to accept or discard 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, and you can't choose to accept or discard the changes that have been made.
Check out Changes in the improved interface to learn more about the significant functionality differences across these types of plans.
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:
| Task | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Configuring your plan | You'll need the Advanced Roadmaps 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 issues, edit multiple issues in bulk, or even use scenarios. |
| 4 | Scheduling issues | Take advantage of the combined 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. You can also manually enter dates to schedule the issues. You can also choose to auto-schedule the issues in your plan. The scheduler will consider several issue details, like estimates, sprints, and releases, and will then suggest how the issues could be scheduled in your plan. You can choose 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 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:
| Task | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Configuring plan settings | You'll need the Advanced Roadmaps user permission to configure the settings of a live plan. 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 scheduler 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 | Live plans feature a seamless integration with Jira Software. Changes that happen in the selected boards and projects will be reflected in your plan. 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 Software. See the following pages to start managing the scope of your plan: Configuring the scope view, Using the scope view, and Creating and deleting issues. | |
| 4 | You can track the progress of issues directly in your plan. 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 | When planning work for your teams, it helps to monitor 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 consider | In 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, target dates are used to schedule issues by default. You can choose to use other custom dates if necessary. To use other dates, you'll need to add these to your plan first. See Overview and Scheduling 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 Software, 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 Software, 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. | |