Read the rest of our Advanced Planning (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) series: Part 1 | Part 2 (you're here!) | Part 3
In the second article of our Advanced Planning series, we'll focus on the importance of good information structure and how it can improve your Advanced Planning plan. In our first article of the series, we discussed how Advanced Planning works and how it can help teams scale operations and drive better business outcomes. Now we will dive into how to set up your information in Jira to make an effective plan.
When creating a plan, it's imperative that the plan is using great structure and information. Great structure helps derive insights more effectively and makes the plan easier to understand. I always like to compare plan building in Advanced Planningto baking cookies. When baking cookies, it's important that quality ingredients are used and those ingredients are being used in the right amounts. The same goes for Advanced Planning plans! In this case, the Jira information are our ingredients and the structure of that information is our recipe. An Advanced Planning plan is only as good as its information structure. Leveraging good information and repeatedly using a solid structure makes for making great cookies, err, I mean plans! Is anybody hungry here?
Hierarchy
Information structure includes numerous pieces, the first being the work hierarchy. It's important that your team establishes a hierarchy of work items and leverages that hierarchy consistently. Advanced Plannning accommodates the varying work hierarchies teams use. Some teams may have a hierarchy of epics all the way down to tasks. Some teams may just use stories and sub-tasks. Those are just a few examples. As long as the structure is established and it is being used properly, you're well on your way!
Advanced Planning will reflect this hierarchy within the plan that you build. Work from Jira is grouped together based on the hierarchy within projects and how those issues are linked. In the Advanced Planning plan, the information is shown in a tiered view so you can quickly see how lower-level work, like stories and tasks, ties to higher-level work, like epics and initiatives.
It's important that the team, or teams, included in the plan are thinking about the work in the same hierarchy. This comes in handy when discussing work at each level and teams can understand the magnitude of the work being done. When everyone is on the same page they can strategize and plan work more effectively.
Jira Projects
The next piece of the structure involves the Jira projects that are included in the plan. The information that is reflected in plans can come from full Jira projects or boards within those projects. The information that is included in the issues will be displayed on the plan. Project configurations and how well information is recorded across projects will have an impact on the effectiveness of the plan.
If your team is including information across multiple projects, project configuration becomes extremely important. Sharing configurations across projects means they will use the same statuses, screens, workflows, and fields. These shared configurations have significant benefits. Statuses can be reduced, which makes it easier to understand the stage of the work being done across projects. Work is grouped together in the plan in a much cleaner fashion.
Shared configurations also result in a more standard way of recording information. There will be more consistency in the information that is filled out within Jira issues. For example, having a configuration that requires start and end dates enhances all related plans. If requiring this information wasn't standard, it would be more difficult to plan out incoming work. Sharing configurations is extremely beneficial as you start to add more and more projects to the plan
Filtering and Linking Issues
Filtering information going into a plan is a good way to highlight the most important work for your team. Advanced Planning has a filtering feature that allows you to include information that you want given a certain criteria. An effective filtering method that I have seen is filtering issues by issue type. There is a limit on the number of issues that can go into a plan. Filtering out certain issue types reduces noise from work you might not want to see. For example, a large number of sub-tasks can be present within a project and may not be necessary for the plan. Adding those sub-tasks into the plan can make the plan busy and could distract from more important information. Advanced Planning enables users to filter those issues out. This creates more room for the relevant work that you want to track.
Advanced Planning can display links between Jira issues. Consistently linking issues, when applicable, within Jira can provide additional context to your plan. Issue linking helps show how work items depend on one another and can show how issues relates to higher-level work. This practice also helps track dependencies, which can help you more accurately plan and prioritize work with your plan.
Good information structure is very important to creating an effective plan to drive success. Hierarchy, standardization, filtering, and linking are great ways to make the plan look good, but they are also important when you start strategizing and communicating with your plan.
In the next article of our Advanced Planning series, we will discuss how to plan capacity by using the tool. Advanced Planning provides many features that can help your team plan workload effectively. Please stay tuned!
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Reach out to Praecipio if you would like to learn more about Advanced Planning and how it can help your business or team implement Agile at Scale practices.
Read the rest of our Advanced Planning series: Part 1 | Part 2 (you're here!) | Part 3
