Managing Features plan in Jira
As a Atlassian consulting firm we are often asked to assist the Product Owner or the Project Manager to keep up with their initial plan and track that the R&D teams are actually developing the right stories at the right time.
In many cases we find complains that even though 90% of the Epic stories are done, the rest of them are wither delayed (without notifying the PO) or left out in the backlog only to be noticed after the epic due time.
There are many control and tracking addons in the marketplace, but still it was hard to find a specific solution to this problem. One of the addons that do solve this problem is Epic Timeline, this addon provide a control screen that integrate the epic planned information (e.g., Due dates) with the information gathered from its stories and tasks. This information give you control of the relevant Epics and stories breakdown, you can see immediately how many sprints your epic is spanning and see indication if your Epic due date is late with its stories – sprint planning. Moreover, you can see if there are unplanned stories that are still in the backlog, so you will know that your epic is not fully committed yet.
Epic TimeLine
Epic TimeLine is a cool and easy to use epics project managment. this addon gives you back the control on the Epic level. There is no need to deep dive into your backlog to try to understand whats going on with your Epics.
Check it out in the Marketplace
Epic Timeline control screen tend to become the PO/Project Manager birds-eye view of the epic content and planning, getting the ALL the information top down, and focus on the relevant stories that need our focus, without the need to try to figure out what’s going on with the plan by viewing only the stories level.
You can view all your Epics, see its stories timeline over the sprints and compare the last development sprint date to the Epic due date. Get color indicators if there are mismatch (delays) between the due date and the last sprint end date.
Another cool feature we liked, is to see if there are stories related to the Epic which where not set yet to a sprint, this will allow you to make sure there are no left over tasks that will prevent your feature (Epic) to be finished. This will give you the right tool to control the R&D planing work.
Getting into the Epic drill down screen, will allow you to see all the stories related to the Epic displayed over the sprints roadmap. Going through the work plan will give you the needed understating you want. without bothering the development teams.
Again, a nice touch was the story-sprint spilling indication, which present us planned story in a specific sprint which was no completed as planned and continued on the following sprint. Good way to see the delays that occur, and to track the plans.
We think that this cool addon will assist teams with creating their feature planing and tracking, without the need for complex solutions that hard to maintain or just overpriced.
