Advanced Roadmaps in Jira: How to Streamline Your Project Planning

Advanced Roadmaps for Jira is a premium feature designed to help teams plan, track, and manage work across multiple projects. It goes beyond traditional project management tools like Gantt charts and basic roadmaps by offering a unified, strategic approach to long-term planning and execution.

In this article, I’ll provide a quick overview of the Advanced Roadmaps feature, how teams can effectively use its capabilities, and how the tool provides a more unified approach to project and portfolio management.

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.
    
    
• 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.
    
    
• 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.”
    
• 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

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.

Filters and saved views

Narrowing down the information in your plan can help you focus on key tasks, address high-priority issues promptly, identify bottlenecks, monitor progress, and make informed decisions easily. This is exactly what filters help you achieve by applying specific criteria.

Located in the upper left corner next to the search bar in Advanced Roadmaps, filters provide several options to refine the view of your plan:

• Releases: view all issues assigned to a particular release.
  
• Teams: filter by specific teams included in the plan.
  
• Assignees: focus on tasks assigned to particular team members or users within included teams.
  
• Sprints: display issues from any sprint in your plan, with options to filter by sprint type.
  
• Projects: display only issues from selected projects.
  
• Issue Types: filter to display only certain types of issues mapped to Advanced Roadmaps.
  
• Components: filter by components configured in your plan.
  
• Labels: filter by labels configured in your plan.
  
• Dependencies:
  • All issues: show all issues regardless of dependencies.
  • Has dependencies: view only issues with dependencies.
  • Specific issue: display dependencies related to a particular issue in your plan.
    
• Status: view issues based on their current status.
  
• Warnings: show only issues that have warnings.

In addition to the standard filters, Advanced Roadmaps supports the use of custom filters if configured for your plan:

• Single-choice select one option from a predefined list of values, like a priority level (High, Medium, Low) for an issue.
  
• Multiple-choice select: multiple options from a predefined list of values. As an example, this can be multiple technologies used in a project (e.g., JavaScript, Python, Java).
  
• Checkbox: Yes/no or true/false criteria. For instance, indicating if a task requires approval (Yes/No).
  
• Radio button: Select one option from several predefined values, such as the project phase (e.g., Planning, Development, Testing).
  
• Label: Custom labels applied to issues for categorization. For example, issues can be tagged with specific themes like “User Interface,” “Backend,” and “Security.”

Once you have applied the desired filters, you can save these configurations. Saved views allow you to get a quick snapshot of your plan in a customized format and focus on relevant aspects. For example, a project manager might save a view that highlights upcoming deadlines and critical path tasks, while a team lead might save a view focusing on their team’s current sprint and individual task assignments.

To save a view in Advanced Roadmaps, click on the three-dot menu in the top right corner, select “Save as,” enter a name for your view, and click “Save.”

Dependencies

Anticipating bottlenecks and streamlining workflows is crucial for moving projects forward and completing them efficiently. The dependency feature in Advanced Roadmaps helps with this by identifying and tracking relationships between tasks and projects.

For example, in a SaaS product development project aimed at improving user engagement, if redesigning the user interface (an Epic) depends on completing mockups (a Sub-task), understanding these dependencies ensures tasks are completed in the correct order, preventing delays.

To manage dependencies:

• Hover over the schedule bar of the desired issue and click the + icon.
  • Right side for outgoing dependency (indicates the issue must be completed before the dependent issue starts).
  • Left side for incoming dependency (indicates the issue is dependent on another issue being completed first).
• Select the issue to link as a dependency.
• Confirm by clicking the checkmark.
• Adjust dates by dragging the ends of the schedule bar; badges will turn red if there are conflicting dates.

By managing dependencies effectively, you can then move on to ensuring resources are allocated efficiently, which brings us to the importance of capacity planning.

Capacity and Scenario Planning

Allocating resources effectively by understanding each team member’s availability is crucial for any project. Capacity planning in Advanced Roadmaps helps achieve this by ensuring work is distributed realistically, avoiding overcommitment, and ensuring timely delivery. By setting up and managing team schedules based on their availability, you can adjust workloads, assign tasks appropriately, and visualize work distribution over time.

In addition, capacity planning has key benefits, including preventing team burnout, optimizing resource usage, and improving project predictability by aligning tasks with available capacity. It also helps set realistic deadlines and manage stakeholder expectations.

As an example, let’s take a software development team led by a project manager working on a new feature for a SaaS product. Using capacity planning, the PM can see that her team of developers has 200 hours available for the next sprint. She assigns tasks based on each developer’s availability, ensuring that no one is overloaded. By adjusting workloads and reassigning tasks, she balances the team’s efforts and keeps the project on track, preventing burnout and meeting deadlines.

To set up capacity planning:

• Ensure sprints are set up in your scrum backlog, and the board is chosen as the issue source. 
• Link the relevant teams to the issue source and assign at least one issue to the sprint or team.
• Navigate to your plan’s “view settings” and choose to view by either “Team” or “Sprint”.
• Select the “Show capacity on timeline” option.

This will allow Advanced Roadmaps to monitor the amount of assigned work in the plan, comparing estimated values to your team’s capacity. In your plan timeline, tabs at the top represent sprints or iterations, with a vertical bar indicating capacity.

While capacity planning helps manage current resources, scenario planning allows project managers to anticipate potential challenges and adapt proactively. This tool helps simulate various “what-if” situations, allowing for informed decision-making about the best course of action.

Continuing from the previous example, suppose the project manager wants to prepare for potential delays or unexpected changes in the project. By using scenario planning, she creates different scenarios: 

1. The feature release is delayed by two weeks due to unforeseen bugs.
2. An additional developer is brought in to expedite the process.
3. The scope of the feature is reduced to meet the original deadline. 

By evaluating these scenarios, she decides that bringing in an additional developer provides the best balance between cost and timely delivery. This proactive approach allowed her to address potential risks and keep the project on track.

To set up scenario planning:

• Go to the Scenario menu located next to Settings and select “Create scenario.”
• Name your scenario and choose a color (any changes will be flagged with that color).
• Select starting point options:
  • Start with a blank scenario using data from your Jira Software issues. 
  • Start with a copy of an existing scenario inheriting changes from any selected scenario.
• Once everything is set, click “Create” to finalize your new scenario.

By using all the features Advanced Roadmaps offers, you can ensure deadlines are met, resources are optimized, and potential challenges are quickly addressed. Explore the rest of our blog for more Jira insights, and enjoy your project’s roadmap planning!