Plans

Short-Term Planning with Sprints (The Team Level)

Sprint planning is the foundational, short-term planning method used by Agile teams, primarily those following the Scrum framework. This process typically focuses on a two-week horizon. Teams use the Jira Backlog to select a small, manageable set of Stories, Tasks, and Bugs (often estimated in Story Points or hours) that they commit to completing within a specific, time-boxed Sprint. This is a high-fidelity, execution-level plan that is directly tied to the team's capacity and focuses on incremental delivery. The sprint board in Jira provides real-time visibility into the team's current work-in-progress, ensuring focus and quick adaptation to blockers. Sprints are all about how the team will deliver work right now.

Long-Term Planning with Plans (The Portfolio Level)

Planning over longer periods, often across quarters or years, utilizes Jira's Advanced Roadmaps feature (previously called Portfolio for Jira) to create a Plan. This is a low-fidelity, strategic-level plan that focuses on answering questions like why the work is being done and when major features (Epics and Initiatives) are expected to be delivered. The Plan pulls data from multiple team spaces, allowing portfolio managers and executives to visualize work across different teams, manage cross-project dependencies, and forecast timelines based on aggregated team capacity. This method is crucial for budgeting, resource allocation, and setting stakeholder expectations for major product releases.

Integration on Jira Plans

The true power of Jira planning is realised when these two methods are dynamically integrated using Advanced Roadmaps. Advanced Roadmaps bridges the strategic view with the tactical team work in the following ways:

• Roll-up and Alignment: The Plan pulls the detailed work items (Epics, Stories, etc.) directly from the teams' Jira boards and sprints. This allows the strategic Initiatives in the Plan to show progress based on the completion of the Stories and Tasks being worked on in the teams' live sprints.

• Capacity-Based Scheduling: When program managers plan an Initiative on the roadmap, Advanced Roadmaps can automatically assign the underlying work to future sprints based on the team's defined capacity (velocity).This means the long-term plan is not a static guess but a realistic forecast grounded in the actual speed and availability of the execution teams.

• Real-time Synchronization: Changes made at the strategic level in the Plan (e.g., re-prioritizing an Epic) can be committed back to the team's individual backlogs, and conversely, the progress made by the team in their current sprint is reflected instantly in the high-level roadmap. This two-way communication ensures that the long-term strategy remains agile and grounded in delivery reality.