Creating business roadmaps using Jira Work Management

[Thomas Cooper]

I have recently joined a program that is in requirements and analysis as a Business Solution Lead. Our challenge is that many teams are working at the feature level but the business needs to overlay the Program Epics in order to create an operational roadmap.

Is the creation of a business level program in JWM a solution to pull the Team level epics and features under the Jira Software project in order to create a roadmap for the business to display things such as operational readiness?

[Diogo Teles · Accepted solution]

Hi @Thomas Cooper, welcome to the community!

Sine your platform is Cloud premium, you have a potent tool to do what you mentioned: Advanced Roadmaps. 

You can use this article as a starting point: Advanced Roadmaps in Jira Software.

There is a bit of learning involved and some setting up on top, but once you've scoped and configured your Plan, you can create a robust solution. These work at the team level (e.g. tasks like capacity planning) or at a higher level (e.g. tracking business progress towards strategic goals)

You can easily pull Epics from different projects into a single plan and use higher hierarchical levels than epics, called Initiatives.

How you will use this will depend significantly on how teams use projects and if they are using Stories for features and placing them under the umbrella of an epic. Stories can be associated with epis after creation even if they are not. 

Advanced roadmaps are generally a better method of concatenating information from different sources instead of creating a project for that purpose.

I would also recommend looking into Atlassian Atlas if the purpose is to track the progress of higher-level goals or projects.

[Thomas Cooper]

@Diogo Teles This is a terrific starting point, thank you. I think my unique challenge will be to insert the Roadmap with Initiatives and Business Epics after the delivery team have already been working toward what they have drafted as epics. 

I am hopeful that Jira Work Management would allow the business to overlay a roadmap on technical discovery that has been ongoing for more than a year.

This has been very helpful.

[Diogo Teles]

Jira work management roadmaps are still evolving. I think their vision is that a Jira Work Management project will track each non-software dev process. The insights feature in those projects grabs info from existing JWM projects to aggregate information. 

At our org, we already have advanced roadmaps configured for everyday use and not enough JWM projects, which is why I have not explored this solution much (and also because Atlassian is still improving it).

It is worth keeping an eye on how it evolves, as it may become a good alternative to use cases that in the past were only covered by advanced roadmaps. 

Good luck finding your solution :)