Effective planning is essential for keeping projects predictable, transparent, and aligned with business goals. Jira offers a flexible ecosystem of native features and Marketplace apps that support everything from roadmap definition to sprint execution.
Project Planning in Jira
Jira Scrum & Kanban Boards
Jira is designed to empower agile teams to plan, monitor, and transparently execute their work. Jira brings clarity to project management by making work visual, with Kanban and Scrum boards, and allowing teams to enable backlogs for work that they can’t get to right away.
Boards help teams plan by:
- Backlogs: Prioritizing items, estimating effort, and preparing upcoming work.
- Sprints: Organizing iterations with built-in capacity indicators.
- Kanban: Continuous flow planning with WIP limits and cycle-time insights.
Planning Poker
Planning Poker is a consensus-based process agile teams use to estimate the amount of effort (in time or story points) needed to complete a task. Its purpose is to generate more accurate estimates and a shared understanding of effort by involving the whole development team. Jira doesn’t include Planning Poker natively, so you’ll need an app from the Marketplace.
Why Teams Use Planning Poker
- Reduces Bias: Everyone reveals their estimate simultaneously, avoiding anchoring.
- Builds Shared Understanding: Discrepancies lead to discussion that exposes gaps, risks, and hidden complexity.
- Improves Forecasting: Consistent team-based estimation leads to more reliable velocity over time.
Typical Planning Poker Workflow
- Select a batch of backlog items.
- Discuss the context and clarify requirements.
- Team members choose a value (often Fibonacci-based).
- Everyone reveals their card simultaneously.
- Discuss differences; repeat until the team reaches consensus.
- Save the estimate to the Jira work item.
Planning Poker fits naturally into backlog refinement sessions and helps keep estimation collaborative and transparent.
Jira Hierarchy
In some ways, project planning is built into the Jira structure itself. The Jira hierarchy allows you to create three levels of work items (parent items, standard items/stories, and subtasks). If you use Jira Premium or Enterprise, you can customize the hierarchy to include even more levels, and if you’re looking to break your tasks down into smaller steps you can use checklists on your work items.
Viewing your project’s work item hierarchy – seeing how many epics are in progress and what their level of completion is, enhances sprint planning as well as the overall project direction.
Jira Capacity Planning
Another important aspect of planning is accounting for your team’s capacity. You don’t want to commit to more work than your team can deliver. If you have access to Jira Plans (Premium & Enterprise level) then native Jira lets you set the capacity of your teams, but not for groups or individual users. For more refined capacity planning try Portfolio by HeroCoders which includes a purpose-built capacity planner.
High-Level Planning & Roadmaps
While native Jira has excellent features to support project planning, things get murkier at the higher level. Teams using Jira Premium or Enterprise have access to the useful, but somewhat limited Jira Plans. Jira Standard lacks high-level planning tools – a gap that can be filled using a Marketplace app.
Jira Plans (formerly known as Jira Advanced Roadmaps)
Jira Plans is a native tool for long-term forecasting, scenario and release planning across multiple projects. Plans include multiple views (timeline, board, and calendar), dependency tracking, and Confluence integration that makes it easy to share views with other stakeholders.
However, capacity planning is quite limited in Jira Plans as it can only be done at the team level – with no mechanism for tracking or adjusting the capacity of individual users or groups.
Marketplace Apps for Jira Planning
The Atlassian Marketplace offers a variety of apps to fill the gap. Some of the most notable ones are:
- Structure by Tempo – Tempo provides a planning app to visualize and manage multiple Jira portfolios, epics and projects from one project management tool. The catch is that to get a 360-degree view you need multiple apps; one for structure, one for Gantt charts, one for capacity planning, etc.
- BigPicture – With features like table, board and Gantt view, BigPicture is a popular solution. It is a bit pricey and doesn’t allow you to export a plan in order to share it with external stakeholders.
- Portfolio by HeroCoders: Portfolio is the all-in-one Jira PPM app that provides multiple views (table, Gantt, graph, tree map and pie chart), inline and bulk editing, and a built-in capacity planner that even lets you track team member's PTO.
Jira excels as a project planning and tracking platform, supporting both agile and traditional workflows. But if you need to plan and track across multiple projects, get a view into users’ capacity and even add new fields on the fly, then you’ll want a Marketplace planning app like Portfolio for HeroCoders.
