What is Advanced Roadmaps for Jira?
Formerly known as Portfolio for Jira, Advanced Roadmaps is a tool that helps teams achieve larger business objectives and collaborate on big-scale initiatives. It works by pulling data from Jira projects, boards, and filters and displays it in a customizable visual interface.
As a feature available in Premium and Enterprise plans, here are some of the things you can do with it:
- Create visual roadmaps that include multiple teams and projects, mapped-out epics, and initiatives. These help you see the big picture and make informed decisions.
- Plan team capacity realistically to avoid overcommitment and ensure timely delivery.
- Manage dependencies between tasks and projects to anticipate bottlenecks and streamline workflows.
- Experiment with different scenarios and timelines to evaluate risks and adapt plans.
- Prioritize work based on business value, dependencies, and team capacity to ensure the most critical tasks are addressed first.
Advanced Roadmaps’ compared to other project management methods
To understand how Advanced Roadmaps enhance planning, it’s essential to see how it compares to traditional tools like Gantt charts, standard roadmaps, and portfolio management systems.
- Gantt charts are a traditional project management tool used for specific task scheduling and dependency management. They offer clear visual timelines of tasks, milestones, and deadlines. However, they are often limited in flexibility and struggle with managing complex dependencies across multiple teams.
- Advanced Roadmaps differs by offering a more strategic, high-level approach. It allows teams to plan and track work across multiple projects, see real-time updates, and schedule tasks dynamically. It accommodates changes in task status, dependencies, and team capacity, making it better suited for long-term, multi-team planning.
- Advanced Roadmaps differs by offering a more strategic, high-level approach. It allows teams to plan and track work across multiple projects, see real-time updates, and schedule tasks dynamically. It accommodates changes in task status, dependencies, and team capacity, making it better suited for long-term, multi-team planning.
- Roadmaps are typically used to align teams with long-term strategic goals, helping organizations visualize the path from current efforts to future outcomes. However, traditional roadmaps often focus on a single team’s objectives and may lack integration with other teams’ plans.
- Advanced Roadmaps stands out by integrating multiple team roadmaps into a single, unified view. This approach effectively manages dependencies between teams and ensures that all teams remain aligned with the organization’s broader strategic goals, offering a more comprehensive planning tool.
- Advanced Roadmaps stands out by integrating multiple team roadmaps into a single, unified view. This approach effectively manages dependencies between teams and ensures that all teams remain aligned with the organization’s broader strategic goals, offering a more comprehensive planning tool.
- Portfolio management tools provide a broad overview of multiple projects, offering high-level insights into the progress and status of ongoing initiatives. However, they often do not provide the level of detail needed for day-to-day task management and can be disconnected from the granular work done by individual teams.
- Advanced Roadmaps bridges this gap by combining strategic portfolio oversight and detailed task management. This allows project managers to see the big picture and ensure that every task and action aligns with the organization’s larger objectives, providing a more integrated and actionable approach to project and portfolio management.
How to work with Plans in Advanced Roadmaps?
A plan in Advanced Roadmaps outlines all the work needed for your project in a timeline format, breaking down tasks into issues assigned to teams. As a sandbox environment, any changes made to your plan will only affect your actual Jira Software data once you choose to commit them.
Your plan is a combination of roadmaps from multiple teams, making it the key feature you will interact with in Advanced Roadmaps. It serves as a comprehensive view of all ongoing and planned work, integrating various team efforts into a unified strategy.
Let’s say you’re a project manager at a tech company overseeing a new product launch. This project involves multiple teams: Engineering, Design, Marketing, and Sales. Here’s how you can set up and manage this project using Advanced Roadmaps:
- Create the plan: Navigate to “Plan” in the top navigation bar, select “Create,” and name your plan “New Product Launch 2024.” Choose the access type—Open for team collaboration or Private to restrict access.
- Set the issue sources: Select the relevant projects and boards from each team to ensure that all launch-related tasks are included in the plan.
- Configure exclusion rules: Use the exclusion rules to filter out irrelevant or completed tasks. For example:
- Exclude issues completed more than 15 days ago.
- Filter out non-essential tasks like bugs.
- Remove tasks with statuses like “Closed” or “Resolved.”
- Exclude irrelevant releases, focusing only on those pertinent to the launch.
Once your plan is set up, you can break down the work in the following way:
- Structure the work: Under the “Launch New Product” initiative, create epics such as “Develop Core Features” for Engineering and “Design Product Interface” for Design.
- Break these epics into stories and sub-tasks, like “Build User Authentication System” and “Design Database Schema.”
- Break these epics into stories and sub-tasks, like “Build User Authentication System” and “Design Database Schema.”
- Manage dependencies: Link-related tasks to ensure a logical workflow, such as linking “Design Mockups” to the “Build User Authentication System” so development starts only when the design is ready. Align Marketing and Sales tasks to ensure materials are ready for the campaign launch.
- Plan capacity: Use capacity planning to ensure teams are not overcommitted. Adjust workloads based on availability, such as reallocating tasks if the Engineering team is nearing capacity in the upcoming sprint.
- Scenario planning: Create scenarios to prepare for potential changes. For instance:
- Delay the launch by two weeks to accommodate design revisions.
- Add extra resources to the Marketing team to speed up campaign preparation.
After finalizing and reviewing the plan, commit the changes and now regular updates will help keep all teams aligned.
Now that we’ve outlined the basic steps for setting up and managing a project in Advanced Roadmaps, let’s dive deeper into each of these points in greater detail, with additional examples to help you fully understand the tool’s capabilities and usage.
Permission levels
To effectively manage your plan and ensure that everyone involved has the appropriate access, it’s important to understand the different permission levels available in Advanced Roadmaps:
- Administrator: Full control over the plan, including creating, editing, deleting plans, setting permissions, and committing changes back to Jira Software.
- Shared Team Management: Manage shared team settings, such as configuring team capacity and assigning team members, ensuring accurate and up-to-date team allocations.
- User: View and edit plans without administrative privileges. Users can update tasks, adjust timelines, and contribute to the planning process without changing the plan’s overall structure.
- Viewer: This is read-only access to the plans. Viewers can see all details and progress but cannot make any changes, ideal for stakeholders who need to stay informed without direct interaction with the plan.
Hierarchy levels
Advanced Roadmaps enhances Jira’s standard issue hierarchy by introducing an additional level called Initiative.
- Initiatives: High-level strategic goals that encompass multiple Epics.
- Epics: Significant bodies of work that can be broken down into smaller tasks.
- Stories: Functionalities or features that deliver specific value.
- Sub-tasks: Smaller tasks required to complete a Story.
Furthermore, Advanced Roadmaps allows users to create and customize as many levels as needed. This flexibility offers a more comprehensive approach to planning, helping teams visualize the full scope of work, from high-level objectives down to individual tasks.
To better understand the hierarchy structure, let’s look at a practical example involving a SaaS product development project focused on improving user engagement:
- Initiative: Improve User Engagement
- Epics:
- Redesign User Interface
- Enhance User Onboarding
- Implement Gamification Features
- Stories:
- Create a new homepage layout
- Develop tutorial for new users
- Add achievement badges
- Sub-tasks:
- Design mockups
- Write tutorial content
- Code badge functionality
- Custom Levels:
- Milestones: Mark significant progress points
- Epics:
This structured approach provides a detailed and comprehensive roadmap, ensuring all aspects of the project are covered and tracked effectively.
Having a detailed ToDo checklist within each issue is crucial for breaking down tasks into actionable steps, ensuring every detail is noticed, and making it easier to track progress. Using a checklist helps teams maintain clarity and accountability, which is essential for meeting deadlines and achieving project goals.
To implement this effectively, consider using Smart Checklist for Jira, which allows teams to create detailed ToDo lists within Jira issues, making tracking progress easier and ensuring that all necessary steps are completed. Features like mandatory items, text formatting, and custom statuses help teams organize their work efficiently.