Jira Cloud Advanced Roadmaps: The Ultimate Guide for Beginners

Deeply explore all about Jira Cloud Advanced Roadmaps for effective planning and tracking of projects across business units. Visualize the tasks to meet your goals and improve progress rapidly in real time:

As a team, you need to know your work items’ current and future health. Advanced Roadmaps helps you plan and track work across your teams. This feature allows you to manage team capacity, track dependencies, and prioritize.

The Advanced Roadmaps feature lets you include issues from boards, projects, and filters to create a plan for multiple teams or the entire organization. Project teams can use this plan to estimate release dates for their projects.

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Get Started With Jira Cloud Advanced Roadmaps

This article outlines the key concepts and best practices for planning and tracking using Advanced Roadmaps in Jira Cloud.

Advanced Roadmaps are available as part of the Premium and Enterprise plans only and not in the lower plans. It is available FREE for the Jira Data Center and can be downloaded and installed as well.

Here is a quick video on Jira Cloud Advanced Roadmap along with a few tips and best practices:

Features:

• Add and expand your hierarchy levels in the plan.
• Look at all dependencies that can impact the project timelines.
• Stay in Advanced Roadmaps. Data will not be saved into Jira unless ready.
• Plan based on the capacity and velocity of the team.

Pre-requisites:

• Jira Cloud Account with Premium or Enterprise plan
• Jira Admin permissions

So, with Advanced Roadmaps, you have a powerful planning tool that will help to visualize your work items or issues to meet your goals. Advanced Roadmaps works only with company-managed projects in Jira Software cloud.

Why Should You Use Advanced Roadmaps

Advanced Roadmaps offers project teams the following benefits:

• Tracking and visualization of the progress with an exact duration of when the tasks are due.
• Better visibility of project lengths and individual progress.
• Making important decisions on the projects and their initiatives.
• Assess the impact of the addition of any tasks.
• Analyze when tasks are added or modifying the timeline affects the entire project.
• Manage any unforeseen tasks added or if the priority of certain tasks changes

With Advanced Roadmaps, you have a visual plan wherein you can predict how long a project or an initiative may take to deliver.

Advanced Roadmaps help teams to accelerate and deliver faster by increasing visibility and most importantly making important decisions.

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Permissions in Advanced Roadmaps

Before we start to create a plan, which is the core component, or a shared source of truth for the teams in advanced roadmaps, we need to set up permissions that can Create, View, and Edit the plans. By default, Jira Admins and System Admins have permissions. We can assign the user group for access to the Advanced Roadmaps.

As you login to Jira Cloud and as Jira Admin go to Plans-> Settings. Under Advanced Roadmap User, add the appropriate groups.

Hierarchy in Advanced Roadmaps

Hierarchy in Jira shows how issue types are related. The typical hierarchies that organizations follow are Epic => Story, Task, and Bug => Subtask.

You can add custom issue types above Epic e.g. Initiative as per the project needs.

To set the hierarchy in Advanced Roadmaps as a Jira Admin, go to Plan => Settings => Advanced Roadmaps => Advanced Roadmaps hierarchy configuration

You can click on +Create Level to add a custom hierarchy. Important to note is that this is a global setting for the entire instance. All plans will follow this hierarchy.

About Sample Jira Project Used For Planning

I have a sample project with Story issues in Backlog and 2 versions. I will use this data for my planning and tracking.

Create Plan in Advanced Roadmaps

The plan can be created by a user. To create the plan, go to Plans => Create Plan.

Enter the plan name and select the Board. Click on Create.

The initial view of the plan created looks as shown below.

Start and Due date are pre-defined fields. These dates, if not mentioned, will be taken from the Sprint dates, which are configured in the plan settings under inferred dates.

If any other field or custom field needs to be selected click on the Fields drop down and select the desired field.

Select the Sprint field.

E.g. select a sprint for the first Story issue. The start and due dates are auto-populated.

The progress bar in weeks is also updated on the right.

Similarly, select the appropriate sprint for all other issues as well which originally is in Backlog. Remember here that the Sprints are not updated in the main Backlog view unless Review changes are done.

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Create Team in Advanced Roadmaps

Teams can be associated with the plan. You can group and filter work based on teams and help manage the allocation of work, which will be based on capacity.

To create a team, click on the drop-down next to the plan and select Team.

Click on + Add Team.

Select ‘Create a plan -only team’

Click on Next. Add a name, and members of the team, and select Issue source. Click on Create.

Similarly, add one more team.

Switch back to the plan and select the field Team to be visible in the plan.

Set sprint for a few Story issues as shown and the Team as well.

Let’s Group by Team in the Plan view. Click on View Settings => Group by => Team

The view now looks like the one below.

Since there could be multiple teams, you could also filter on viewing issues for a specific Team. Click on Filter and select the appropriate team.

Create Parent Issue in Advanced Roadmaps

If you look at the plan created, it has Story and Bug issues, but it does not have any Parent issue Epic and no Story linked to it. In this section, we will look at creating an Epic issue and link Story issues to it.

In the plan, click on the Top-level planning view.

In this view, click on + Create issue => Epic.

Enter the Epic summary and click on Enter.

Enable the Parent field and for the Story issues set the Epic as a parent issue.

The final view looks as below with the Parent-child and planned for the appropriate Sprint.

Please note here that the changes are not yet saved in Jira but are present only in the plan. We will look at the option to Review changes for the data to be saved in Jira.

Add and View Dependencies Between Issues

Dependencies are very important in the roadmap, as they specify the relationship between issues and help to understand any blockers. In the plan, the Dependencies are shown by badges.

Let’s look at an example here.

In the plan, let’s assume that issue SSP-14 is dependent on SSP-1. This means that SSP-1 BLOCKS SSP-14.

In the Plans => Settings, set the issue link type as Blocks that will be treated as Dependencies in the plan.

Open the SSP-1 issue and link it to SSP-14 with the link type as Blocks.

Back in the Plan refresh once and view the dependency in the Dependency Management view. This typically means that for SSP-14 to start SSP-1 should be completed.

Also, look at the Dependencies Report, which is shown in a Visual format.

The filter can also be applied to view only issues with Dependencies.

Review Changes and Save Issues in Jira

As we were discussing, the changes have to be saved in Jira since the data is currently in the plan only. To save changes, click on the Review Changes button.

The changes done to issues are shown and will be saved.

Click on Save Selected Changes in Jira.

Back in the Backlog view, look at the data saved in Sprint 2 and 3.

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Limitation of Advanced Roadmaps

In Advanced Roadmaps, there are limitations in how much data a plan created can handle.

• Issue limits: A single plan can handle up to 5000 issues post that there could be performance issues.
• Team limits: It is suggested to have at most 50 teams in a single plan. If more are added then you will need to search for the same.
• It is better to spread your work across multiple plans.

Tips to Improve the Performance of the Plan

The larger and more complex your plan, that much more time it will take to load the plan. Here are some possible ways to improve the performance of the plan:

• An issue source in your plan like the board, should contain only relevant issues.
• Keep a tab on the limit of issues as mentioned in the previous section to 5000 max.
• If there are issues related to older releases, consider removing them and focusing on issues specific to your current releases else it may slow down the performance of the plan.
• Remove older sprints from your plan.

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Conclusion

In most organizations, senior management asks for a roadmap of work planned for 2 to 3 quarters. Because of this and in this article, we have looked at a very essential feature of planning and tracking issues with a view of future work in Advanced Roadmaps.

This feature is a must for use for every product or project team, which provides a single view of your entire work tracking and progress, which includes dependencies and teams’ capacity.

The goal for every project team is to ensure the work is completed on time, which can be achieved with Advanced Roadmaps.

Hope this article helped you in the process of how to track the work for the future.

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