Over the past few years, Atlassian customers have been asking for Jira Plans (formerly Advanced Roadmaps) to support team-managed projects, and Atlassian listened. As of July 2023, Jira Plans allows organizations to visualize and plan work within team-managed projects, giving teams the flexibility to set up their own projects and run them as they see fit.
Organizations can now incorporate these projects into their Jira Plans ideas just as they would company-managed projects. While this new release is the first milestone of a multi-phase roll-out, it represents a new era of dynamic possibilities for driving business agility.
In this article, we explore how Jira Plans works, what this new release means for Agile teams, and how Atlassian plans to launch new and upcoming features for team-managed projects.
How Does Jira Plans (Formerly Advanced Roadmaps) Work?
Jira Plans is a powerful tool that empowers teams at scale to plan, manage, and visualize work, serving as the single source of truth across multiple teams and projects. With its big-picture visibility, Jira Plans enables organizations to map and monitor work against strategic initiatives and report on progress to key stakeholders.
The platform also helps teams stay aligned on shared goals and respond to changes quickly while still practicing Agile methodologies like SAFe® or LeSS. Different from Jira Align, Jira Plans is a powerful tool for small-to-medium-sized organizations that need a way to connect strategy to work execution.
From daily tasks to high-level business initiatives, it provides them with big-picture visibility of how their work tracks against strategic outcomes. The Agile transformation platform also aggregates work items from Jira and creates a visual representation of how that work relates to other teams and projects.
Jira Plans also has multiple features that enable teams to create meaningful visualizations for planning work. Work items can be filtered based on different criteria, such as issue type, initiative, team, and assignee, just to name a few. Jira fields can be added or removed to provide additional details about work items. Teams can also adjust their plan to display different time frames, allowing them to see work coming down the pipeline in a month, for the next quarter, or even the following year.
What Are Team-Managed Projects?
Configured and governed by any team member, team-managed projects are ideal for independent teams aiming to maintain their work procedures and methodologies within a self-contained environment. For example, a recently developed team working on a brand new product can benefit from the flexibility within team-managed projects since they can autonomously define workflows and processes that support their unique requirements.
Such projects come with basic configuration procedures, giving project administrators greater authority when setting up the project without the need for a Jira administrator to intervene. This is different from company-managed projects, where the configuration of schemes and screens by an individual with site administrator privileges is mandatory.
Jira Plans: Current Limitations & Upcoming Releases
The latest update to Jira Plans is the first of several new features to come for team-managed projects. As a result, there are some limitations with the most recent release:
- Only global custom fields are accessible by Jira Plans plans, meaning any custom fields defined solely within team-managed projects are not currently available for use within a plan.
- The highest hierarchy level available for team-managed projects is Epic, and all issues within team-managed projects can only be parented by issues within their project. Therefore, issues from team-managed projects are unable to be rolled into higher-level issue types defined by the issue type hierarchy within Jira Plans, nor can they be rolled up to Epics from other projects.
- Since exclusion rules utilize global issue types and statuses, they are unable to be applied to issues within team-managed projects.
Gain Powerful Business Intelligence with Jira Plans
Jira Plans is a robust planning tool that empowers organizations to visualize active work, plan future initiatives, and manage teams at scale by seamlessly integrating projects within the Atlassian platform. With this recent inclusion of team-managed projects, autonomous teams can now realize the potential of Jira Plans, gaining valuable insights into how all their work items in Jira relate to each other and the organization’s business initiatives.
Business transformation doesn’t come easy, but tools like Jira Plans certainly help the cause. As an Atlassian Partner Specialized in Agile at Scale, Praecipio has helped hundreds of organizations connect strategy to execution with platforms like Jira Plans and Jira Align.
To learn more about Jira Plans, check out our resources:
- Read how this Fortune 40 Retailer implemented Jira Plans to support SAFe®, enabling teams to plan work effectively and make data-driven decisions in real time thanks to improved visibility.
- Confused about the difference between Jira Align and Jira Plans? Read this article.
- Watch this webinar and learn how to plan and track work across multiple teams and projects with Jira Plans.
- Read this three-part series on how Jira Plans enables organizations to scale Agile principles: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
If you’re ready to take the next step in your Agile transformation journey, Praecipio can help. Contact us about building a dynamic, connected organization that drives value and innovation at scale.
