Jira Planning with Scrum and Kanban Boards
Let’s start with planning for agile teams. Jira supports Scrum and Kanban Boards, which are necessary for the proponents of the Agile approach. They’re clear and visualize all of the tasks, show their statuses, and help Managers to observe the Project load and success. As agile teams need the ability of quick updates and changes, Jira boards provide high flexibility for them.
Scrum teams can easily observe tasks in the backlog, estimate them and add them into the next sprint:
These boards are helpful and easy to use… but they’re not designed for high-level planning.
There are three points why can’t boards be used for advanced planning :
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To begin with, they lack cross-project visibility for shared resources within different scopes. Usually, one board equals one project, so if the Manager has 5 projects he/she needs to switch between 5 boards every time and in the end, information can just get mixed in the head.
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It’s impossible to get an understanding of the user’s workload, so they get over- or underloaded. As a result, people miss the deadlines, which affects the whole project, become exhausted and unmotivated. When the Manager assigns someone to a specific task or project, he/she can’t see the actual workload of the user, which may cause side effects.
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Users don’t have the visualization of the tasks’ progress as well as the proper time tracking and reporting.
Luckily, Jira has a great assistant – ActivityTimeline, which helps to build users’ greatest plans and track the workflows.
Resource Planning in Jira with ActivityTimeline
ActivityTimeline is an add-on for Jira which serves all planning needs of Jira users. It provides a planning Dashboard for the high-level overview. Observe all of the projects, their tasks, and resources in a single place. Plan for different scopes and teams.
One more benefit is that ActivityTimeline integrates with external calendars, like Google or Outlook calendars.
Personal Planning in Jira with ActivityTimeline
The fourth way is personal planning in ActivityTimeline. Each user has a personal cabinet with his/her own tasks and projects available only for that user. Users can control their workload on their own, in order not to become overwhelmed with work. The work plans are visible on the personal timeline, people can log worked hours directly from the cabinet and observe the logged hours. The in-built time tracker assists with the calculation of worked hours.
Team Planning in Jira
ActivityTimeline provides the Team Panel, which can help with the fifth scenario of Jira planning. It assists with planning within different levels – individual and teams’. The team panel allows assigning tasks to the whole team.
For example, teams can work on the same project, e.g. development of some app, but one team develops the Android version and the other works on the iOS version. One more advantage is that the panel shows aggregated workload/availability of teams in hours or percentages.
Team panel also grants a possibility to observe teams with users which is an “all-in”, as the Manager sees current progress and future plans on both detailed and comprehensive levels.
We’ve presented just a shortlist of possible scenarios for planning in Jira, but this list is being constantly updated. In order to receive a new piece of useful information, come here – 4 Ways How to Track Time in Jira.
