Company-wide Roadmaps using Easy Agile

[Tamara Khan]

Hi, we're using easy agile to create a company-wide roadmap for all of our projects. It's a beautiful overview of everything going on at the company.

What we've done is create a board with a query filter that grabs all epics across all of our projects. This allows us to put epics across our entire JIRA instance onto one roadmap. We currently use themes as swimlanes for different projects. But, we have a few limitations with this:

1. With all of the data on our roadmap, the plugin has become slow, and the board often struggles to pan and scroll.
2. It would be nice to be able to view/edit issue details from the roadmap without opening the issue in the new tab. (Like the edit pane in the backlog)
3. Roadmaps created in easy agile on their individual project board aren't reflected in our master board. It would be great if the start/end dates we set for an epic persisted on all of the roadmaps that the epics appear on... OR it would be nice if we could turn off easy agile on the individual project boards so that people don't accidentally try to edit things there only to discover that their work doesn't show up in our company-wide view.
4. It's pretty hard to move items from one project to another. We have to use the move function. It would be nice to be able to drag and drop them between swimlanes to change the project key. Or somehow have swimlanes organized by project
5. We attach epics to fix versions to denote their due date, it would be great to have epics set their end dates accordingly. This could be an option, as I am sure not all teams do this.
6. We cost estimate our epics, so it would also nice to have them sized accordingly. I know your observations are that people have to move their tickets as they release creating new epics, so you allow repeating of the same epic to support that. But we've found creating new epics for each version a good practice. It allows us to create accountability for what is committed on the roadmap and use our epic list as a version history document.
7. It would be nice to embed a live version of our roadmap on confluence that updates as we update the master roadmap (rather than have to save and upload PDF's). If this were possible, we probably wouldn't have created the board across all projects but would have embedded each team's roadmap onto a single confluence page that updated live. 

Our question:

Has your community come up with any better solutions for creating a cross-company (multi-project) roadmap? 

If they have come up with anything that addresses the issues above, we would love to know! We really like using Easy Agile. 

Thank you for making a great product that is helping our team a ton!

Tamara

[Seamus Kieran]

Hi Tamara,

I'm glad to hear you're such a fan of Easy Agile Roadmaps! We're a small team striving to provide great software and support to companies around the globe and it's great to see we're getting our name out there. A few of the points you've raised are currently open as feature suggestions on our backlog, I just have a couple of questions to help us clarify our understanding:
1. Out of interest, how many issues do you currently have scheduled? Would you be able to send a copy of your support information to support@easyagile.com so we can have more context around how to improve performance for you.

2. We have an open suggestion on the backlog for this - would you prefer inline editing of the summary, or if we popped the full Jira edit dialogue?

3. We have a story to roll-up multiple Roadmaps onto one timeline, as you have described. We're investigating the best way to configure this while maintaining the ability to have completely separate team-level roadmaps.

4. This is the default Jira functionality, unfortunately I don't think this is a part of our product vision for Easy Agile Roadmaps due to the complexities involved under the hood.

5. We are investigating elegant solutions to allow customers to set their issue's start and end dates via fields in Jira but must also respect our decision to allow flexibility and multiple-scheduling on the Roadmap. We have a suggestion open.

6. Estimation and team velocity have been on our radar for a while now, we just haven't been able to find an easy and flexible way to effectively incorporate them into Easy Agile Roadmaps. I'll add your comments to the open suggestion, and keep you updated.

7. Confluence embedding is something we would love to include into our app. Live updating between the two platforms is something we have on our backlog, but there are many complex issues we need to solve before bringing it into production.

In terms of best practices for cross-project/team roadmaps I'd recommend taking a look at our team enablement materials, and our blog for some suggestions. Other than that, it sounds like your team(s) are quite advanced in their Roadmapping.

Thanks for the fantastic suggestions Tamara, we are always looking for ways we can improve. Please let me know if there is anything we can to to assist you further, or better support your team. We will reach out to you if/when the featured you have suggested are released.

Kind Regards,
Seamus Kieran
Easy Agile Support Team

[Tamara Khan]

Hi Seamus

1. There are not that many issues. Maybe 100-150. I will send the support information to support.

2. I'd prefer an editing pane, similar to where there the issues list pops up. With the same inline editing functionality that you see on the next gen roadmap issue pane. 

On the rest, thank you for the information. 

[Patricia]

HI Seamus Kieran,

Looks good and like your blogs.

Just one question. We also use Easy Agile Roadmaps for every team. How can I create a company wide roadmap if each team has its own roadmap in Jira. They are on the same platform in Jira, so can I link it together or something?

Regards,

Patricia

[Chris Burles]

Hi @Teagan 

Do you have any news/update on the ability to embed Easy Agile Roadmaps from Jira into Confluence, as mentioned by @Tamara Khan & @Seamus Kieran

It's something we are also keen to see so that we can provide visibility across our organisation and move away from other roadmapping solutions.

Thanks

Chris

[Teagan]

Hi @Chris Burles

Thanks for reaching out via Community. 

We are currently re-visiting our Roadmap strategy and in discussions with our customers we know that a Macro for Confluence is an important part of using the Roadmap as a communications tool. 

While we do not yet have a confirmed delivery date, we will be investigating how to deliver this functionality over the next month or so. Would you be interested in providing feedback/user testing prototypes when we get to that stage? 

Thanks Chris, appreciate your patience while we work to bring you this functionality 
Teagan Harbridge
Head of Product - Easy Agile

[Teagan]

Hi @Tamara Khan

My name is Teagan and I am a Product Manager at Easy Agile. I wanted to reach out on behalf of Seamus to let you know we have shipped Easy Agile Roadmaps 4.0.

This release includes the ability to synchronise the Roadmap schedules with the Start/Due date fields in Jira. This synchronisation works both ways:

• Date fields uses set on issues will determine where issues are set on the Roadmap
• Schedule changes made on the Roadmap will update the date fields on your issues

Now that the date fields are synchronised to the issue, not just to the board, the issue will appear in the same position across multiple boards. Not only does this make it easy to co-ordinate work across teams, it allows roll-up or aggregate roadmaps to be created quickly and easily.

You can read the full release notes here.

We wanted to say a big thank you for your patience and feedback while we worked on bringing you this functionality. As always, we're keen to hear your feedback so please feel free to send it through via this thread.

Thanks Tamara, we're looking forward to your feedback!
Teagan Harbridge
Product Manager - Easy Agile