Porftolio Schedule Start Date does not change

[Jüri Tomingas]

I have Set Target Start and Target End dates for my Inititatives, 30.04 till 29.06. Underlying epics have been assigned to releases which should take places on 02.04 and 19.06 which go nicely inside the Initiative timeframe.

But the problem is that  Scheduled Start date is magically calculated to 03.04 and hence my Initiative roadmap looks different than targeted. If I now remove the releases from epics then Initiative roadmap looks ok.

The Scheduling Factors do not shed any light why Scheduled Date is pushed randomly month earlier...Is it expected behavior? Or how to get rid of this?

[samrobertsofficial]

Hi @Jüri Tomingas,

I understand the frustration and I'll try to explain best on our side why this is happening (without knowing the exact details of your plan, I have to speak generally). Target start + end dates is a feature intended to be used to baseline your work. For example you might target start March 1, but then later you find the project actually started on April 1, so realise you're 1 month behind your target. 

The scheduling algorithm of Portfolio will only take into account the target dates if you have the setting Plan->Configuration->Scheduling->Unestimated item scheduling->Base on target dates. Otherwise, your target dates will not influence the Portfolio scheduling algorithm, which may be why you might see a big difference between the two.

Without knowing all the details of your plan I can't exactly say why the scheduled start date was 03.04. If you need your initiative to start on 30.04 you could consider using the 'Earliest start' field on that day. But it sounds like it could be more related to release calculation. 

Let me know if I missed anything. 

Thanks,

Portfolio for Jira team.