What you’ll find in Plan Settings - New capabilities and updated designs

[#1]

Hi all!

Irene here – a lot’s been happening in Plan settings as of late, and I want to give you a rundown of the changes. There’s a few new capabilities to discuss as well as some layout changes that make managing your plan easier.

Turn planning features on and off

You can now turn on or off advanced planning features in your plan to match what you need to track. In the Plan settings pages, you can now turn off scenarios, the autoscheduler, and releases.

That last one is new. Let’s take a look at what this means for you.

Turn Releases on or off

Plans is built to track complex plans that span multiple teams, but what if you don’t need to worry about releases?

Those who aren’t planning against development timelines can hide release data from their plan, as well as the fields that relate to them. When you turn releases off in your plan, you’ll no longer see:

• the Releases tab

• the Releases field from the timeline as well as any filters that use it

• release markers on the timeline, calendar, and program board

• the option to group work items by assigned releases in the View settings menu

• any rolled up dates based on releases

In our documentation, we cover how to turn off releases in your plan along with what you should know before you do it.

A refreshed Plan settings experience

We’ve simplified the Plan settings menu to be easier to use and more helpful than before. Everything still functions the same; it’s just that some things have moved and might look different than before.

If you haven’t already, you’ll see this change in the coming weeks.

Before	After

Let’s quickly outline what’s different in your plan settings:

• Details - This page combines what was on Plan info and Permissions into one page, similar to what you’d find in projects. From this page, you can update your plan’s information and who can access it.

• Estimation and scheduling - Aside from the name, this has the same features as the old Scheduling page.

• Work in your plan - This is the largest change in the bunch. This single page combines four pages (Work item sources, Exclusion rules, Removed issues, and Find my issue) into one page with two tabs.

  • The Overview tab shows what’s currently in your plan (Work item sources) while also making it simpler to add or remove work.

  • The Removed work items tab combines the page of the same name with Exclusion rules. By their powers combined, this tab gives a comprehensive overview of what’s been taken out of your plan, whether work was removed using a rule or removed individually from your planning interface.

  • The search bar on either page can be used to find work items in your plan.

• Timeline - This page is where you can manage timeline-specific functions like managing saved timeline views as well as adding field columns using the Fields added on the timeline section.

• Program board - This page hasn’t changed at all. It’s still used to manage Program boards in your plan.

• Features - As mentioned above, it’s where you can turn advanced planning features on or off, depending on what capabilities you need. The settings pages for Scenarios, Auto-scheduler, and Releases appear in the side nav once you’ve enabled them in your plan.

Let us know what you think

Let us know using the Give feedback option in your plan (next to Unsaved changes) or leave a comment here.

Have a great day!

[pawarsachin84]

Hello @Irene , 

I appreciate you sharing this article; it provides a clear explanation of the Jira Plan capabilities and is well-structured. The Atlassian Community will undoubtedly benefit from a greater understanding of its capabilities and improved tool navigation. 

[__ Jimi Wikman]

The new settings will take a while to get used to for sure, but I like it :)

I'll have to get used to it more before I offer any feedback, so I offer more than just reactions :)

[AMIN EL]

@Irene this is wonderful and we use those features always. On the other hand many of our users are confused about some areas. Such as:

1. Could we get clarity on Advanced Plans, vs. Goals/Projects in Atlassian Home ? How do those two paradigms work side by side ? 

2. Plan of Plans ? What is the best practice when you wish to create a Grand Plan cross many projects that you wish to link their children directly to the epic of the grand plan. While still keeping a chance for local workspace to still have its own Workitems / Epic which now has an external parent - not disrupt its capabilities inside the workspace story e.g. sprint reporting and timeline.

[Pierre Lassablière]

Hi,

Thank you for the updates. The title mentions new capabilities but when reading the updates it sounds like the same features, just different menus.

Any plans to work on scheduling in Plan to make it easier or more robust ?

[Brian Hill]

I've been tinkering with some of the saved views to try and get a portfolio level report that shows each project as a stacked horizontal bar, with project Epics color coded as a project phase, and inclusive of Deliverables/Milestones as a bar overlay. You can see a long term MS Project UI equivalent in https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Custom-Visuals-Ideas-read-only/Gantt-Chart-Collapsed-with-Milestones/idi-p/342907#comments but I've been stumped so far on creating this to support client portfolio reporting at this level of aggregation in Jira Plans. Would be great to see this level of timeline aggregation to support portfolio reporting.