project planning in jira

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How to Create Meaningful Plans in Jira?

Project planning is a critical aspect of ensuring the success of a project. Jira is a powerful tool that can help project managers and teams define their goals, identify risks and dependencies, and create comprehensive roadmaps to keep their projects on track. In this article, we’ll explore how Jira’s roadmaps functionality can be leveraged to translate project plans into actionable tasks, prioritize work, and visualize the progress of a project. 

We’ll cover the key steps involved in project planning in Jira, including defining the goals of a project, determining risks and dependencies, and creating a roadmap that accurately reflects the project plan. 

Whether you’re new to Jira or an experienced user, this article will provide valuable insights into how to make the most of Jira’s project planning capabilities.

Table of Contents

Project planning in Jira starts… outside of Jira?

The initial phase of any project usually involves gaining a comprehensive understanding of its purpose and objectives. This includes answering questions such as “What is the need for this project?” “What are the desired outcomes?” and “How will we measure the success of the project?”

Once the project objectives are clearly defined, the next step is to secure organizational support and bring together the team responsible for executing the project. Then the project’s requirements are gathered in detail, either through a formal specification process or by creating a product backlog. 

While the methodologies for executing the project may vary, we’d suggest starting by clearly understanding the following:

• The stakeholders and the target audience
• What the project is hoping to accomplish as well as some metrics for success
• At least a general understanding of the architecture and tech stack
• What already exists, both in terms of existing work and in terms of competitors

These insights will help you identify your objectives, blockers, and risks. From here, it becomes easier to structure the solution in a way that addresses them all. Sometimes addressing them means developing a feature, sometimes it means a process or a workaround, and sometimes it can even mean the decision to live with the problem for the time being.

Prioritization and identification of risks using BRIDGeS

Here at Railsware, we use a methodology called the BRIDGeS framework . It is a solid approach for multi-context analysis that leads to a conclusive decision or solution.

The project planning process using BRIDGeS can take anywhere from 2 to 16 hours, depending on the complexity of the context. The four stages are:

• Problem Description: Conduct a brainstorming session to identify key subjects and their descriptors. Ensure that all team members have a thorough understanding of the context before moving forward.
• Prioritization Exercise: Prioritize benefits, risks, and issues to focus on the most important tasks during the Solution Stage. This will prevent time wastage on less critical tasks.
• Solution Variations: Generate potential high-level solutions that address the benefits, risks, and issues identified in the Problem Space.
• Solution Breakdown: Break down the high-level solution into smaller, manageable tasks, or “epics.” This will create a roadmap for implementation and make it easier to track progress.

What do we get as a result of a BRIDGeS session?

A complete roadmap for implementation that is comprised of ready-to-use Epics containing prioritized tasks. 

Remember: Risks and blockers are a part of your backlog

It’s important to understand that blockers and risks are usually just backlog items, except they don’t know it yet 😀. Levity aside, the goal in addressing blockers and risks is to convert them into scope that can then be prioritized, refined, and implemented (or even discarded). At the end of the day, we want to know how much time and attention we allocate to each.

If something blocks our project from being launched, we are interested in whether there is a different approach or workaround to address it. If not, then we can cancel the project, pack up and go home. But in my experience, that is rarely the case. Once the solution or workaround has been defined, it can be prioritized along with the rest of the scope. Of course, unlike some items in the scope, the items related to the bottleneck will be marked as “must” (as opposed to “should”, “could” or “won’t”).

Risks require a more nuanced approach. Firstly, we are interested in their likelihood, severity, and addressability. This helps with prioritization but also helps decide which risks to address. For each risk, there may be one or more mitigation strategies available (and for some there may be none). The choice of mitigation strategy and its priority in the backlog will depend on how likely the risk is to materialize, and what the consequences are if it does.

Mapping out a new project in Confluence

Atlassian offers a nice Project Plan Template for Confluence. It’s perfect for putting together the scope you’ve worked on, identifying key Jira users, and drafting a timeline that will later become the roadmap for project tasks in Jira.

The first step of filling this document helps with resource management and team composition planning as you will be mentioning the driver for the project, approvers, contributors or assignees, and stakeholders. You’ll also have the objective, key outcomes, and the status of the project visible at a glance.

The scope section is designed for identifying what needs to be done. You can also reference your lower priority tasks as well as some objectives that would be nice to complete but aren’t necessary to the project’s success. The prioritization excursive we did before with BRIDGeS should be of great help.

The next section of the Project Plan Template is the timeline for work management. It serves as a nice visual representation of the tasks and schedule of your software development team.

Lastly, you’ll need to break down your work into milestones. You can set due dates for each milestone and they can serve as a backbone for diving deeper into Sprint planning down the line.

Overall, this template is a great reference doc for keeping the project team and the stakeholders on the same page without necessarily forcing the latter to dig deep into the Jira project.

Why are these steps important before using Jira?

Jira is an excellent tool for structuring data and putting together an actionable implementation plan. That said, it is not a magic wand. It won’t function the way you wanted it to unless your input is good, hence the necessity for the abovementioned steps.

Migrating the work you’ve broken down into Jira

We have a detailed guide to working with roadmaps in Jira on our blog. Feel free to check it out if you’d like to explore this subject deeper. 

Jira does not have any additional levels of hierarchy outside Epics and Issues out of the box. You can use Jira Themes and Initiatives to access them. However, this functionality is limited to Jira Premium or third-party add-ons from the Atlassian Marketplace. We will be focusing on Epics and Child Issues in this article. 

From here on out, I will be using a company-managed, cloud-based Jira project as an example. The concept will not change if you are using a different Jira instance, however, the interface and certain navigation elements may differ. 

For starters, we’ll need a new Jira project. Creating one isn’t particularly challenging, but there are two tricky choices you’ll need to think twice about. The very first thing Atlassian will ask is whether you’d like a Scrum board or a Kanban board for your project. You can also opt for alternative project templates but these two are the closest thing to the default options for Jira.

The choice between Scrum and Kanban is a bit tricky as neither is better than the other. Kanban emphasizes nimbleness and adaptability through a continuously improving workflow. Both boards represented work with cards and both have customizable columns for task management: “to do”, “In progress”, “Done” or any other variation that fits within your process. The movement of cards through these columns is known as a Jira workflow.

The key difference between Kanban and Scrum lies in the process of prioritization and selection of work that needs to be done. Kanban boards have a single backlog of tasks and you select which ones go to the board based on their priority. A Scrum board will have a Sprint backlog in addition to the “main” backlog. You’ll be selecting the work that needs to be done during a single Sprint out of the entire pool. Please take a look at this guide if you’d like to know more about creating and managing Sprints .

The second choice you’ll need to make is a between team-managed or a company-managed Jira project.

• Team-managed projects have simplified configuration. They are much faster to set up and are a better fit for an autonomous team as most things can be done by a Project Admin rather than the Jira Admin. The settings of a team-managed project do not affect other projects. You can also manage permissions more easily.
• Company-managed projects offer access to all of Jira’s functionality. They allow for issues from other projects to be shown at the board and open access to more comprehensive agile reporting. Company-managed projects also allow sharing of certain settings like workflows or automations across multiple projects.

Once you have chosen your preferred setup, you’ll be prompted to create a project. Give it a name, configure the remaining details, and you are all set.

Figuring out Jira’s project management software capabilities

Jira can seem overwhelming at first glance, but there are only three core elements you need to effectively transition your roadmap and project plan into the platform: Epics, Child Issues, and Dependencies. Luckily, we already have these figured out from the pre-Jira BRIDGeS session and written down in Confluence.

• Epic : An Epic is a significant body of work that can be broken down into smaller tasks. For instance, creating a landing page for an e-commerce platform would be considered an Epic. You probably have your own way of grouping up tasks, be it features, product areas, etc. Regardless, these clusters will become your Epics in Jira. Keep in mind that every Epic will be visualized as a separate bar on the roadmap.
• Child Issue: Child Issues or Jira issues are the smaller tasks that make up an Epic. These are the user stories that you need to cover to release a functional feature. Normally you’ll use the “story” issue type for them in Jira. Complex issues might have subtasks of their own or you can opt to break down the work through a checklist inside the issue.
• Dependency : Dependencies are used to visualize if some work is blocked and show the order you’ll need to follow in order to successfully deliver results. For example, you can’t implement a payment system without first choosing one, and you can’t add content until the layout of the page is finalized. These are direct dependencies where one Epic (or task) blocks the progress of another.

With a broken-down plan of activities at hand, and a good understanding of what goes where in terms of task hierarchy, you can start building up an actionable roadmap in Jira. 

Open the Roadmaps interface from your Jira project.

From there, you will create your very first Epic. This shouldn’t be too complicated since you know what goes inside it as well as the associated Child issues. Simply select your Epic and click on the + icon to add them.

Pro tip: You can use Smart Checklist to refine your requirements through a more detailed decomposition of tasks. Checklists are also helpful when you have some research items as you will have a list of items that specifies the things you wanted to check. 

Dependencies

The last thing that’s left is to visualize the dependencies. This functionality is used to show whether a task is blocked by a different task or not. Thanks to your efforts during the initial planning stage you already have a prioritized, refined scope and shouldn’t have any issues while visualizing dependencies. 

You can set up your dependencies via drag-&-drop on the roadmap directly, or you can link your issues from within the issue view. You’ll need to open an issue and click on the button with two links. Then select the “link issue” option and link your issues.

Gantt charts VS roadmaps

Anyone familiar with a Gantt chart will immediately find the resemblance in the Jira roadmap. That being said, they have their differences.

A Gantt chart is essentially a much more detailed version of the roadmap. Building one will require more information input. For instance, you will need to account for:

• Team/resources

The payoff is a lot more data you can use in project planning. For instance, you will be able to manage resources and handle allocation planning much more simply.

A roadmap, on the other hand, is a high-level plan that is meant to be communicated as such. It is a less defined, less detailed version of a Gantt chart. It serves as a loose prediction and there’s no commitment to following it in detail. 

I know that this statement sounds like Gantt charts are plain better than Roadmaps. We’ve all been told that putting in more effort will yield better results when we were kids after all. In this case, however, this statement is false.

Gantt charts were quite popular during the times when projects were built upon the waterfall model. Nowadays, when development and project management are much more lean and agile, the added complexity of a Gantt chart makes it less flexible when there’s a need to respond to change. 

We can gain some insights by looking at the 4 principles of the Agile Manifesto

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools – the more strictly-defined nature of Gantt chart activities means there is less communication, putting it at odds with the Agile approach.
• Working software over comprehensive documentation – While Gantt chart activities can have deliverables attached to them, that is not necessarily the case, making the Roadmap better suited for an Agile project.
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation – The implicit flexibility of the high-level roadmap makes it a better choice according to this principle as well.
• Responding to change over following a plan – The Gantt chart implies significantly more effort put into creating a plan, affecting the team’s ability to respond to change.

Can you build a cross-project roadmap with third-party apps?

By default, Jira does not support more than one project per roadmap. While this is not the end of the world, this is a serious limitation for more complex projects that involve cooperation between different teams or entire departments.

There are several options for overcoming this challenge, but all come with an additional pricing tag.

• Jira Premium comes with Advanced Roadmaps functionality that allows for building a cross-project roadmap.
• Jira Align is also a Premium solution that offers even more flexibility, but at the same time, it is the most expensive option targeted at Enterprise organizations.
• Lastly, there’s the Atlassian Marketplace that offers access to a variety of Jira plugins that extend the basic functionality.

This little comparison chart can help you understand the differences better.

Would you like to know more about agile project management?

This is a handy list of resources you may want to check out before planning your first project in Jira:

• Product roadmap in Jira
• Using projects as templates in Jira
• Best tools for test management in Jira
• How to create multiple subtasks in Jira
• How to manage the Definition of Done in Jira
• Overall Jira best practices

Try Smart Checklist for free!

Published by Oleksandr Siryi

Hey! My name is Oleksandr and I am an Atlassian Marketplace partner and technical writer at Railsware. Most of the time I write about Jira, workflows, automation, and project management with an emphasis on Agile practices. View all posts by Oleksandr Siryi

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Visualizing Work Across Teams with Plans in Jira Software

• Duration 1.2h
• Difficulty Intermediate
• Credential For Completion

Accurately map and predict work

Maintain a single source of truth for your team’s ongoing work with plans in Jira Software, formerly known as Advanced Roadmaps. Learn how to use the auto-scheduler to make recommendations based on your team’s work, capacity, and timelines, and easily identify dependencies between issues to prevent bottlenecks.

After this course, you’ll be able to:

• Use your team’s data in Jira Software to accurately determine resources, scope, and launch dates for future projects.
• Create a plan in Jira Software, add issues , and highlight key information.
• Automatically schedule work and predict the impact of data changes.
• Indicate milestones and deadlines with releases and cross-project releases in your plan’s timeline.
• Create different scenarios to explore the impact of changes to scope, capacity, or deadlines.

Visualizing Work Across Teams with Plans in Jira Software is part of a larger Configure Atlassian Tools and Practices for Developer Flow learning path .

What are plans in Jira Software?

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How to Effectively Leverage JIRA for Project Management?

JIRA is a powerful tool for project management that can help teams to organize and manage projects more effectively. Whether you’re working on software development projects or any other type of project, JIRA provides a comprehensive solution that can help you to manage tasks, issues, and projects more efficiently. 

With its range of features and customizable options, JIRA is a valuable software that can help teams to achieve their goals and deliver projects on time. In this blog, we’ll explore how to use JIRA for project management in an effective way, including setting up JIRA, creating and managing issues, using JIRA Agile for Scrum and Kanban project management, and integrating JIRA with other tools. 

We’ll also cover best practices for using JIRA, so you can get the most out of the tool and manage your projects more effectively. 

Table of Contents

What is JIRA?

Why use jira for project management, agile methodology support.

• Using JIRA for Project Management: A Step-by-Step Guide

Integrating JIRA with Other Tools

Best practices for using jira for project management.

JIRA is a tool developed by Atlassian that is widely used for issue tracking and project management. It is a flexible platform that can manage various types of projects, from software development to operations and support. 

JIRA Software offers features such as issue tracking, project planning, and reporting, and it integrates with various other tools and platforms such as Confluence , Bitbucket , GitHub , Slack , Jenkins , and ServiceNow .

In JIRA, issues are used to track tasks, bugs, and other work items that need to be completed as part of a project. Issues can be assigned to team members, prioritized, and tracked for progress. 

JIRA also provides various agile tools for Scrum and Kanban methodologies, allowing teams to manage and visualize project progress.

JIRA is a highly versatile and widely-used platform that offers many benefits for project management. Some of the key reasons to use JIRA project management software include:

Issue Tracking

Customization, integration, user-friendly, collaboration.

Now, let’s discuss each reason in detail:

JIRA provides a centralized system for tracking and managing issues and tasks, which helps teams stay organized and on track. Issues can be assigned to team members, prioritized, and tracked for progress. 

This allows teams to easily see what needs to be done, who is responsible for completing each task, and how far along each task is. Tracking and managing issues in real time helps teams identify and resolve problems quickly and efficiently, which is essential for project success.

JIRA offers a range of agile tools for Scrum and Kanban methodologies , which allow teams to manage and visualize project progress. These tools allow teams to prioritize tasks, set sprint goals, and track progress against those goals. They also provide a visual representation of project progress, making it easier for teams to see what needs to be done and where they are in the project timeline.

JIRA can be customized to fit the specific needs of different teams and projects, which makes it a flexible and scalable solution for project management. Teams can add fields, create custom workflows, and configure the platform to meet their needs. 

This flexibility allows teams to tailor JIRA to their unique project requirements, which helps to improve efficiency and ensure that the platform is well-suited to their requirements.

JIRA integrates with various other tools and platforms, allowing teams to streamline their workflows and improve collaboration. For example , JIRA can be integrated with development tools like GitHub , source control tools like Bitbucket , and collaboration tools like Slack . 

This allows teams to seamlessly combine all of their tools and data into one platform, which improves efficiency and helps teams to work more effectively together.

JIRA provides various reporting and analytics tools that help teams measure and understand project performance, which is crucial for making informed decisions. Teams can use these tools to track metrics like velocity, burn-down charts, and sprint reports, which provide valuable insights into project performance and help teams identify improvement areas.

JIRA is designed to be user-friendly and accessible, with a range of features and tools that are intuitive and easy to use. Teams can quickly and easily get started with JIRA, even if they have limited experience with project management tools. This makes JIRA software an ideal choice for organizations that manage projects with limited resources and time.

JIRA facilitates collaboration among teams by providing a centralized platform for communication and issue tracking, which helps to improve visibility and ensure everyone is on the same page. Teams can use JIRA to communicate and collaborate on issues, track progress, and share files and information. This ensures that everyone works together effectively and has the information they need to succeed.

Overall, JIRA is an effective platform that offers a wide range of features and tools for project management, making it a popular choice among organizations of all sizes. Its versatility, customization options, integration capabilities, and user-friendly interface make JIRA a highly effective solution for managing projects and ensuring success.

Interested to learn more about JIRA? Enroll for JIRA Certification Training Now!

Using JIRA for Project Management

JIRA is a project management platform that helps teams plan, track and manage projects effectively. It provides various tools and features that enable teams to work together efficiently, communicate effectively, and make informed decisions. Here are five key steps of using Jira for project management:

Set Up Templates in Jira for Project Management

One of the important features of Jira is the ability to create templates that can be used to set up new projects quickly and consistently. First, it’s important to understand what a template is in Jira. A template is a pre-configured project structure that can include issue types, workflows, fields, permissions, and other settings. 

Templates are designed to be reused for similar projects, which can save time and ensure consistency across multiple projects. To set up a template in Jira, follow these steps:

• Navigate to the Jira dashboard and select “Projects” from the top menu
• Click the “Create project” button in the top right corner of the screen
• Select “Classic project” or “Next-gen project,” depending on your project management needs
• Choose “Blank project” as project type
• Enter a project name and project key, which will be used to identify the project in Jira.
• Click the “Create” button to create the new project
• Once the project is created, you can start configuring the project settings to your requirements. This may include setting up custom issue types, workflows, fields, and permissions
• When you have configured the project to your satisfaction, click the project settings icon (cog) in the screen’s bottom left corner
• Click “Templates” in the left-hand menu
• Click “Create template” to create a new template based on the project settings you have just configured
• Enter a name and description for the template, and choose which project settings to include in the template
• Click “Create” to save the new template

Once you have set up a template in JIRA, you can create new projects quickly and consistently. To create a new project using a template, follow these steps:

• Choose “Select template” as the project type
• Choose the template you want to use from the list of available templates
• Enter a project name and project key, which will be used to identify the project in Jira
• Click the “Create” button to create a new project using the selected template

In conclusion, setting up templates in Jira is a powerful feature that saves time and ensures consistency across multiple projects. 

Following the steps outlined above, you can create templates that include pre-configured project structures and settings and use them to create new projects quickly and consistently.

Create Issues According to Your Project Plan

To use Jira Software effectively for project management, it’s important to understand how to create issues according to your project plan. An issue in Jira is a task, bug, new feature, or any other item that needs to be completed to achieve the goals of your project. Creating issues in Jira is simple and straightforward – you can create them manually or import them from an external system such as a spreadsheet or CSV file. When creating an issue in Jira, you’ll typically include the following details:

• Issue type: This is the type of issue, such as a task, bug, or feature request
• Summary: A brief description of the issue
• Description: A more detailed explanation of the issue
• Priority: The level of importance of the issue
• Assignee: The person who is responsible for completing the issue
• Due date: The deadline for completing the issue

Once you’ve created an issue in Jira, you can assign it to a specific team member and set a due date for completion. You can also add comments, attach files, and update the issue’s status as work progresses.

According to your project plan, creating issues in Jira is important for several reasons. First, it helps you stay organized and focused on the tasks that must be completed to achieve your project goals. By breaking your project down into smaller, manageable tasks, you can ensure that you’re making progress toward your ultimate goal.

Second, assigning tasks to specific team members ensures that everyone knows their responsibilities and that work is completed on time. Finally, Jira’s built-in reporting features also allow you to track progress and identify any roadblocks or issues that may slow down your team’s progress.

Use Teams and Permissions as a Project Manager

It is now time to begin assigning issues. You can assign projects and tasks to your entire team or to a single team member at a time. Use Jira’s permission schemes to limit your team member’s access to tasks and Jira’s settings and third-party apps. Set your default permissions upfront so you don’t have to go back and make these minor changes halfway through a project.

Regarding task management, it is critical to overload team members with only a few tasks or projects simultaneously, especially when managing multiple projects simultaneously. Use Jira’s monitor team capacity feature to help you distribute work.

Keeping Track of Your Projects

The most important aspect of project management is project tracking. Prioritizing specific aspects will be determined by your needs as a project manager. This can include monitoring team performance , task completion times , and the proximity of deadlines . Jira Software highlights this information based on your settings and template selection.

Whatever the case may be, Jira provides insights into the efficiency of your team members as well as which tasks you should prioritize. The following are some popular plugins that can be useful when managing projects:

• Structure: Suitable for both agile and traditional project management methods. Structure centralizes all Jira information in one place
• Gantt Charts: Another comprehensive visualization tool, this plugin includes a risk matrix and a resources module
• Tempo Planner: If the visualization of resource management sounds appealing, a plugin like Tempo can clearly understand all team members’ workloads and capacities

You can simplify project stage monitoring by combining Jira software’s visualization and agile tools . Once you’ve completed a set of tasks and completed a project, you can move it to the archived projects section. When you get there, you can view and edit your project.

Utilize Jira’s Agile Project Management Methodology

Jira is an agile project management tool that supports Scrum , Kanban , and mixed methodologies. Jira allows you to create workflows that are unique to you and your team. You can also modify default workflows to bring the agile methodology to the forefront of your project management process. It is also possible to link workflows to projects.

User stories, an essential component of agile methodologies, elevate Jira users to the forefront of team engagement, tracking, and communication. User stories help to clarify the customer value of project activities and work well with agile project management teams.

Jira is well-known for its Scrum support; it supports Scrum’s scaled agile framework , which includes sprint planning, standups, sprints, retrospectives, and Scrum teams. To create a more personalized workflow, you can use fixed-length or future sprints and toggle agile features on and off as needed.

Any experienced project manager understands the importance of flexibility in gaining control of project tasks and workflows. Jira software frees project managers from the constraints of traditional project management software. Instead, managing projects with Jira workflows is a customizable process that can be used by technical, software, and agile teams.

JIRA can be integrated with various other tools and systems to enhance its functionality and provide a more comprehensive project management solution. Integrating JIRA with other tools can help teams streamline their workflows, automate tasks, and gain insights into project performance and progress. Some common tools that JIRA can be integrated with include:

• Confluence: JIRA can be integrated with Confluence, a team collaboration and content management tool, to provide a more comprehensive project management solution
• GitHub: Integrating JIRA with GitHub, a popular version control system, can help teams streamline their development process and track code changes more effectively. The integration allows teams to connect their JIRA projects with their GitHub repositories, making tracking and managing the progress of code changes and related issues easier
• Other Project Management Tools: Integrating JIRA with other project management tools can provide teams with a more comprehensive and streamlined approach to managing projects. By connecting JIRA with tools such as Trello , Asana , and Monday , teams can benefit from the best features of each tool and create a customized project management solution that fits their specific needs

Read this blog on Azure DevOps vs JIRA to understand the working principles and which suits best for project management?

It refers to guidelines and recommendations for effectively using JIRA to manage projects. These best practices can help teams to get the most out of JIRA and ensure that projects are managed efficiently and effectively. Some of the key best practices for using JIRA project management include:

• Defining Clear Project Objectives: Teams should start by defining clear project objectives, which will help them to prioritize tasks and focus their efforts on the most important aspects of the project
• Setting up Effective Workflows: Teams should establish effective workflows in JIRA, which can help them to manage tasks and issues more efficiently and ensure that projects are delivered on time.
• Customizing JIRA to Meet Specific Needs: Teams should customize JIRA to meet their specific needs, taking advantage of features such as custom fields, notifications, and filters to create a solution that works best for them.
• Keeping Projects Organized: Teams should keep projects organized in JIRA by using tags, labels, and versions, which can help them to keep track of the progress of each task and issue.
• Utilizing JIRA Agile for Scrum and Kanban Project Management: Teams can benefit from using JIRA Agile for Scrum and Kanban project management, taking advantage of its flexible and customizable approach to managing projects

By following these best practices, teams can ensure that they are effectively using JIRA project management and delivering projects on time and within budget.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, JIRA is a powerful tool for project management that can help teams stay organized, track progress, and collaborate effectively. By utilizing its various features, such as issue tracking, workflows, and agile boards, teams can streamline their processes and improve their overall productivity. 

To effectively use JIRA, it’s important to establish clear workflows, customize settings to fit the team’s needs, and communicate effectively with team members. With the right approach, JIRA can be a valuable asset for any project management team.

Are you looking to enhance your expertise in the world of JIRA? We have an exciting opportunity tailored just for you! Introducing our esteemed JIRA Certification Training , designed to equip you with the skills and knowledge to manage projects effectively. 

Whether you’re an aspiring project manager, a software developer, or a seasoned professional seeking to level up your career, this certification training is your gateway to success.

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✨ Plans, an advanced planning feature in Jira Premium

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Planning tools in plans

This page refers to the advanced planning features that are only available as part of Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise.

We have a separate section for documentation about the project timeline that’s included in Jira . Go to the documentation for project-level roadmaps in Jira .

Plans come with tools specifically designed for long-term planning that don’t exist elsewhere in the Jira ecosystem.

Roll-up values

Parent issue and child issue are relative terms used to refer to higher-level issues that contain smaller tasks. This concept scales to any hierarchy level:

an initiative (parent issue) that contains epics (child issue)

an epic (parent issue) that contains stories (child issue)

a story (parent issue) that contains subtasks (child issue)

In this documentation, we use initiative, epic, and story in examples to refer to hierarchy levels based on Agile best practices. However, in Jira Software , these labels can be configured by your administrator.

A big problem for planners is that what you plan isn’t always what ends up happening. Instead of forcing you to manually update values of parent issues, you can tell your plan to infer values of parent issues based on those of the child issues. This is referred to as a roll-up .

From the View settings menu on your timeline, choose either option to infer a value:

Dates - includes start and end dates. Learn more about how your plan rolls up dates

Others - includes estimation values, releases, sprints, and teams. Learn more about how your plan rolls up estimates

Rolling up dates is a calculation that only exists for planning purposes in your plan . When you commit changes back to your Jira issues, these rolled-up values aren’t saved and the date field of your issue will be empty.

For example, let’s look at the screenshot below:

The top level issue is an epic, and contained within are three stories. With rolled up values enabled, your plan automatically picks the earliest start date and the latest end date of the child issues, then applies them to the parent issue. This way, if the child issues get rescheduled, delayed, or removed from your plan (which happens; no judgement), the values of the epics automatically reflect this and keep your plan on track.

As it grows and changes, your plan adds a warning icon in the Scope column to indicate errors such as misaligned dates, overlapping dependencies, missing sprint assignments.

You can view the exact warning by hovering over the warning icon or selecting the Warnings button next to View settings .

Auto-scheduler

your plan can automatically schedule issues for you based on any information that you’ve already added like issue estimations, scheduled issues, dependencies, release and team assignments, and more. From here, you can either commit the plan as is, or use it as a starting point to make further edits.

Capacity and velocity

Capacity and velocity are two features that help you create efficient but achievable plans.

Capacity in your plan refers to the number of story points or hours your team can complete in one iteration. For example, a team with a capacity of 30 story points (which is the default setting) can contain six issues that are estimated at five story points each during one iteration.

Velocity, which only exists within your plan , is your team’s average capacity per iteration over time based on past performance. For example, a team with a velocity of 30 story points will require two sprints to complete an epic estimated at 35 story points, assuming no other work was already assigned to those sprints.

Together, these two features ensure that your plan is realistic based on how quickly your teams are able to work.

Further reading:

Read how to use roll-ups

Learn more about warnings

Learn more about the auto-scheduler

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Get back to project management basics

5 essential principles for success with Jira Work Management

Product Marketing Manager, Ecosystem

In the wild world of project management, it often feels like we’re trying to juggle flaming chainsaws while riding a unicycle on a tightrope – and that’s before factoring in the ever-expanding toolkit of software, methodologies, and processes that are as unique to each team as their pizza topping preferences . Yes, project management has become a bit like assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded – you’ll eventually get there, possibly after a few pillow-screaming sessions, and with the inevitable spare pieces.

Today, we’re unraveling the complexities of project management to talk about five project management essentials every project manager needs for success. Luckily, Jira Work Management is perfect for helping project managers cut through the clutter and get back to basics. So what are the essentials that every project needs? Let’s dive in.

Project essential #1 – Connecting Projects to Goals:

Every project needs 3 fundamental questions answered – what are we doing (scope), what does success look like (metrics) and most importantly, why are we doing it (goal). Without those basic details, it’s impossible to know why it’s worth investing money, time, and energy on a particular project. Using Atlas – Atlassian’s free project and goal tracker – coupled with Jira Work Management, allows every project to be connected to a company or team goal and include a short weekly team update the size of a tweet. Simply link your project to your Atlas ticket, and voila – a clear connection to your project updates and team goals. Now visibility of where you are to goals is easier to find and you can see how teams are progressing along the way. Who says project updates can’t be both informative and concise?

Project essential #2 – Creating Project Overviews

Surveying the lay of the project should be as predictable as a romantic comedy. Project managers crave a simple way to gain an overview of their project, collaborate with others, and easily dive into the details where needed. With Jira Work Management, those carefully crafted overviews are built directly into your first view with the Summary page. Get essential details on your projects without drowning in the details. And, simply add multiple projects to see the same info across a wider picture of teams and tasks. No need for complex dashboard configurations.

Project essential #3 – Managing Project Risks:

Tackle project risks head-on by thinking how to mitigate them from the start. Once you go through a brainstorming activity with your team to think about “What could go wrong”, and “What lessons have we learned from our past projects”, add them to a risk specific board in Jira Work Management. Creating tickets and assigning them to owners allows you to stay on top of the risks and see how they are progressing every week.

Project essential #4 – Getting Approvals from Stakeholders:

If navigating stakeholder approvals on tasks and assets is feeling like more like a stakeout to pin down your approver, you’ll love how easy it is to mark an approver and visualize who has give you the green check mark to move forward. Approvals eliminates the need to search for who approved what and when so you no longer need to scroll furiously through slack messages like you’re searching for the lost city of El Dorado. Simply set up an automation trigger for an action to send a notification to your approver.

Project essential #5 – Connecting Tasks to Context:

Every project manager knows that project management goes beyond mere checklists. Usually, there is actual work behind that task and that has to be located somewhere – and ideally, easy to find! Jira Work Management makes the connection between tasks and context easy with pages created in Confluence directly from Jira. As a project manager, you’ll love how how you can connect every Jira Work Management task to pages, docs, and sheets, contextualizing tasks and making sure that every to-do aligns with the broader project narrative.

Project essential bonus – Learn from project mishaps

Lastly, a retrospective is the unsung but essential hero in a project manager’s toolkit. It’s the pit stop moment that allows the team to pause for reflection and improvement among fast moving projects. Teams can analyze together what went well, what could have been better, and how to fine-tune their approach moving forward. One way to do that is through a practice called the 4 L’s retrospective. This practice gives teams a chance to review what they loved, loathed, learned, and longed for in a project to ensure that each project becomes a stepping stone for even greater achievements.

Create a page directly from Jira Work Management with your Confluence integration or check this page for templates with your preferred whiteboarding tool. The “4 Ls” Retrospective Technique | Atlassian

With the complications of project management, getting back to basics is not just a desire but a necessity. Jira Work Management is a great ally for project managers looking to cover their essential needs while empowering them to focus on what truly matters. By effortlessly connecting projects to goals, creating clear and concise overviews, managing risks with ease, streamlining stakeholder approvals, and contextualizing tasks within the broader narrative, Jira Work Management becomes the compass that directs users back to the fundamentals. So, whether you’re a seasoned pro or a newcomer to the project management realm, Jira Work Management is your ticket to not only surviving but thriving in the world of projects.

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