Using Jira Plans (formally - portfolio) - how to manage baselines

[Yaron Norani]

Hi,

We are using plans to magage cross PI (long term planning) progress.

We can add Epics, see progress of them and so on.

How can we copmpare Plans to the Plan Baseline?

How can I capture baselines for a plan?

For now we have "scenarios" capability in plan - which does not intent to do this capability?

For example - a use case:

I originally planned 5 epics - all for PI1.

Now I have 8 epics at the plan - som were added , maybe deleted , changed the FixVersion data and so on.

How can I easylly compare curent and original plan?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Yaron Norani,

In an older version of the tool, there has been a baseline feature included in the product. However, this has not returned to the current version of the product. There is a feature request for it in the backlog that you can track right here: JSWCLOUD-20495.

In the meantime, we all know that any plan is usually outdated as soon as it is carved in stone. In an agile world, it is not - and should never be - the goal to prove how accurate the initial plan was crafted, but track if the team is still on schedule and leverage real time information to make decisions when things go wrong. So the focus of this tool is on helping you deliver on time, not on demonstrating the quality of (more waterfall up front) planning.

For that purpose, Advanced Roadmaps offers a lot of warning capabilities that let you know action is required to pull your plan back on track. For more information on how to leverage the warnings system, see the product documentation. 

Hope this helps!

[Walter Buggenhout]

On a side note: if you want to track baselines in the current tool, you could add 2 additional date custom fields to store the initial values, e.g. baseline start date and baseline end date.

While Advanced Roadmaps will not offer graphical support to display then on the timeline, you should be able to add them to the custom fields section of your plan for reference.

[Yaron Norani]

Hi @Walter Buggenhout  and thanks for the quick reply.

I will need an option to know whether we moved an epic to other PI, added new and so on.

I agree with you that we need to plan from that point forward and do the best to be on track.

From the other hand, managers usually would like to know:

What was changes?
What was the original plan?

One thing I thought is that we add additional value to the FixVersion field, when the issue spilled over.

For example - Epic planned to be handled in PI1 and was delayed, It will have additional value for PI2.

This can be a good (maybe enough) information.

I tried to visualize it on Plans, but I found that it shows only ONE value for FixVersion, even if the issue contains multiple.

Is it configurable ? (I did not find a way).

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Yaron Norani,

In advanced roadmaps you will indeed see issues in 1 fix version. And that should be the case, since it is a planning tool and the only thing you want to know is in what version (or PI) you will deliver it in.

While there is no out of the box report (afaik) to display what issues were added / removed to a version, Jira does track changes to the field. And fixversion does support history search. That means you can track what version an issue has been in even if it isn't anymore today. e.g. if you want to find out what Epics were in PI2022Q4 and are no longer there at the end, this filter should give you that information:

fixversion WAS PI2022Q4 AND fixversion != PI2022Q4

As a last remark: in my experience working with many different organisations, managers do want to know what decisions were made and why. Rarely does this mean they want to know what the original plan was. To mitigate that, it is a good idea to keep a record of those decisions. And instead of trying to pull all those details from historical Jira reports, rather document your decisions (with a clear definition of why they were taken) in a documentation tool like Confluence. They are much easier to find afterwards if you need them and use plain language instead of reports that still need interpretation. For key decisions in the course of a project that works much better towards a management layer. As a bonus, you can use a Jira macro to refer to the issues that were impacted by your decision. That way, you can tie everything nicely together.

[Yaron Norani]

Thanks!

I will implement and report back if I found some good best practice.

I realy want to try to visualize the "spit over" data - so we will be able to show eailly that the epic moved (delayed).

Of cource for a single one it is easy, just look at the specific issue.

For the higher overview - maybe a Dashboard / Confluence page as suggested,  that will show all epics with their FixVersion data (one or multiple values).