This is Part 1 of our three-part Advanced Planning (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) series. Click to read Part 2 and Part 3.
Does your team leverage Jira to track their work? Do you need a robust planning tool to organize work and timelines? Jira Plans is a great tool to accommodate those needs and much more!
What is Advanced Planning?
Advanced Planning is a tool within the Jira software that can help visualize, plan, and manage your team's work so you can further unlock your planning potential! It's designed to "empower your teams at scale," allowing you to plan and execute work with greater transparency effectively.
Advanced Planning can be used by teams at a small business and enterprise scale. The tool can help groups and organizations track numerous work items, from day-to-day tasks to more significant initiatives. The tool is very customizable and can be built to suit your teams regardless of the methodologies they employ. We've seen both Agile and Waterfall teams benefit from using Advanced Planning.
How does Advanced Planning work?
Advanced Planning intakes work items from your Jira instance and add them to a visual plan. Multiple plans can be created depending on what the team or organization needs. For example, you can add work items from specific boards or complete projects. Information across multiple Jira projects can also be included if you need to see how work interacts between projects. This allows for a centralized planning tool across your team or organization.
Advanced Planning has multiple features that enable teams to create meaningful visualizations for planning work. Work items can be filtered based on various criteria such as issue type, initiative, team, assignee, etc. Jira fields can be added or removed to provide additional detail to your work items. The plan can also be adjusted to display different time frames. For example, you can see how work is planned out for a month, a quarter, a year, or over a custom range of your choosing.
Users can save different views within the plan. So, if there is a view that you love, you can keep it and reference it whenever you need to! For example, we've seen views showing all the work for a small team and views that offer high-level detail of work spread across multiple groups. These views can assist teams in discussions during team meetings and can be added to enhance any project documentation you use.
Advanced Planning is not just a visual tool
Visualizing work is just one of many ways that Advanced Planning can help your team plan work. However, that isn't the only excellent quality of the tool. Making a tremendous visual plan is the critical first step in getting the maximum benefit of Advanced Planning. Plans can assist teams in strategizing and communicating work effectively.
The tool can plan capacity, determine and manage dependencies, and communicate the work being done across teams and individuals. Leveraging these capabilities will help you and your team derive insights to maximize your productivity and success.
Conclusion
This is the first article in our three-part Advanced Planning series. In this series, we will dive into topics surrounding Advanced Planning and discuss how Advanced Planning can be used as a strategic tool to help drive success in your business. These topics include Advanced Planning Information Structure, capacity planning, reporting on dependencies, and use cases. Our next article will focus on how to structure information in Jira so you can make an effective plan!
Please reach out to us if you would like to learn more about Advanced Planning and how it can help your business or team. We would love to help!
Advanced Planning Series: Part 1 (you're here!) | Part 2 | Part 3
