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Most of the content in this page still pertains to the usage of live plans in Advanced Roadmaps.

Check out some of the popular use cases of Advanced Roadmaps in the market, depending on your role.

What's your role?

I'm a Product Manager

As a product manager, you need a way to quickly turn feature ideas and customer feedback into a compelling product roadmap. This roadmap is then used to provide visibility into the team's progress for your stakeholders and for yourself as well. You especially need visibility so you can keep your roadmap up-to-date as things change. If this sounds like you, read on about the ways Advanced Roadmaps can help you plan work better for your team.

Organize your ideas

Start by defining initiatives in Advanced Roadmaps. Think of initiatives as chunks of work that span multiple epics and teams, so you can see what needs to be done in the next planning cycle.

Once you’ve defined initiatives, they need to be broken down into smaller chunks to populate the backlog:

1. Define your initiatives

Define your initiatives by following the steps provided in Configuring initiatives and other hierarchy levels.

2. Break down initiatives into epics and stories

Break your initiatives down into epics and stories that are ready for implementation; they can be turned into actual Jira issues. Follow the steps provided in Creating and deleting issues.

Build a roadmap

A roadmap is based on scope, time, and people. You can play with these variables in Advanced Roadmaps to see different roadmap scenarios. Once you have a backlog of ideas in the form of work items, you need to get everything on a roadmap to share with your stakeholders.

These are the three things you need to build a roadmap:

1. Set the scope

Once you've organized your ideas and the mental backlog is laid out, the work just needs to be estimated.  

2. Determine target release dates

Configure your release dates by creating project-specific releases.

3. Select your teams

Define your teams and their velocities in hours or points. The velocity can be linked directly to a board in Jira. Learn more at Adding and removing teams.

I'm a Development Manager

As a development manager, you’re responsible for making realistic commitments on your team's behalf. During the planning, you need a clear roadmap that you and the product manager have agreed on so you can run the numbers and ensure your team can get it all done. You need a way to easily plan your team's resources and see the capacity of the team at any point in time so you have data to show what’s possible and what isn’t. You also want to keep stakeholders informed of progress and status without too much hassle.

If this sounds like you, keep reading to learn how Advanced Roadmaps can help you plan work better.

Master the art of capacity planning

In cases where you have specialized and diverse capabilities in your team, you may want to be more granular with capacity planning. This helps you keep your plan realistic and avoid bottlenecks caused by the fact that you need certain skills to complete a work item. Learn more about your team capabilities in Stages and skills.

Check team capacity on the roadmap

Advanced Roadmaps can make it easier for you to understand what your team is working on at a much more granular level. This helps when you're planning work scope with project and product managers — you will then have the data to support your views on what’s possible and what isn’t.

Capacity view

The capacity view displays both planned capacity and resource utilization. Capacity is displayed as story points for Scrum teams, while for Kanban teams, capacity is plotted using calendar weeks. You can view capacity by release, team, and even team members.

Story view

The story view shows individual stories and their stages of work. When using Scrum, the schedule creates a swimlane per team and shows the team’s sprints, as well as the stories scheduled for each sprint. When using Kanban, this view plots stories on-a-day granularity timeline. You can also view the schedule as stories by team member. Learn more at Scheduling behavior.

Track the progress of projects

You can see the progress of individual story items, epics, and initiatives. For anything that is unestimated, you can show those items in relation to items that are estimated. This lets you see the percentage of work done on estimated items while also seeing that some unestimated items are still outstanding and require work.

Set your tracking options

Advanced Roadmaps can support different ways to track progress depending on your team's requirements. Learn more at Tracking progress and status.

View your status and progress in the scope view

The progress and status columns in the scope view of your plan display the progress of your plan items.

  • Issue status – Only exists if the work item links to one or multiple Jira issues. It shows the actual workflow status of these issues. In the case of multiple issue links, an icon is shown for the status of each linked issue. 
  • Progress – Sum of work logs on the linked Jira issues, as well as their child issues.

I'm a Project Manager

As a project manager, you plan and coordinate work against milestones to make sure you're meeting deadlines, and to show how projects are tracking against business goals. Dependencies are a big thing for you – they account for 90% of your planning-related headaches – so you need to map out these dependencies, and not just track them. Having a graphical or visual presentation of information is really helpful at times.

Plan according to milestones

  1. Set the scope – Once you've organized your ideas, you can re-prioritize work items accordingly.
  2. Define your releases – Configure your release dates by following the steps provided in configuring release dates.

Manage dependencies to produce a realistic timeline

It’s possible to control the sequence in which items are scheduled on the roadmap by setting explicit dependencies.

  1. Create and manage your dependencies – Configure your release dates by following the steps provided in managing dependencies.
  2. Configure hierarchy levels – Display the dependencies in the graphical schedule by following the steps given in configuring initiatives and other hierarchy levels.

Track progress towards your goals

You can set themes and track progress against these themes to make sure the organization is executing on strategy, and everyone is aligned to the same priorities.

  1. Create your focus areas – Themes are high-level strategic focus areas, value streams, or investment categories. You can use themes to set priorities and define where your teams should devote most of their time. Learn more at Themes report.
  2. Keep track of progress – The graphical schedule shows the results of resource calculations and forecasting based on your plan data. It also provides visibility into forecasted release dates. Learn more at Tracking progress and status.
Last modified on Feb 1, 2021

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