Agile Program Management With Jira page

Upcoming Event

Join us on Tuesday, March 26th from 12-2pm CT for a free, hands-on workshop.
Register here.

Real World Results

See how these techniques have been used on real projects to manage huge teams for products millions of people use daily. Click here to watch.

What Folks Are Saying

Thanks again Justin & Paul! I'm excited to use the planning & estimating tools you all educated us on and continue to grow my Jira know-how.

What Folks Are Saying

Was a fantastic training day, so glad I joined. For those looking to level up your multi-team program management game, give this training a go!

What Folks Are Saying

Thank you for this training. It was wonderful to learn new insights with your open source materials in agile program management!

What Folks Are Saying

Thanks Justin and Paul for hosting. And big thanks for open sourcing your training materials. Looking forward to sharing with my team.

Video

Watch the following instead of reading the rest of the page:

Purpose

In this training, you will learn how to build, maintain, and report accurate and actionable multi-team plans with Jira. Let’s break each part of that down:

• Build - How to take ideas, flesh them out, estimate them, and put them into future plans.
• Maintain - How to keep a plan up to date as development completes and things change.
• Report - How to summarize the plan in an easy-to-digest format for stakeholders and a wider team.
• Accurate - How to use improved modeling of estimates to create more accurate plans.
• Multi-team - How to build plans that coordinates the work items for multiple product teams at a program level.

This training will leave you with a solid understanding of Jira too. However, the ultimate goal of this training is to teach you how to create actionable plans.

Actionable Plans

Know the future so that you can change it.

• Someone inspirational

Actionable Plans are plans that have enough accuracy and forward visibility to enable teams to make changes that actually improve outcomes. These changes might be:

• Restructuring work to avoid blockers
• Better coordinating handoff between teams
• Changing scope
• Exploring alternate solutions
• Adding more resources

We call this process “breaking the long poles”. First, you’ll build a plan:

And then identify areas are the most likely bottleneck delivery times:

And be able to adjust plans to shorten the delivery time:

In this way, program managers can dramatically help delivery performance.

Overview

This training imagines you are managing “Itsy Bitsy Marketplace”, a simple eCommerce website that sells clothing and other items made from spider silk.

You will learn more about the product in Product Overview.

You are tasked with taking one-sentence-long feature requests from Product Managers and turning feature requests into a fully developed product backlog, complete with actionable plans for successful delivery.

To complete the journey, we will:

Set-up a continuous exploration process managed with a custom Jira board:

Refine the feature requests into clearly defined Jira Initiatives:

Wireframe those features to add even more clarity:

Break down the work and use statistical models to accurately estimate delivery times:

Build plans in Jira’s Advanced Roadmap Tool:

Schedule work with Advanced Roadmap’s AutoScheduler:

Maintain the roadmap and facilitate team communication with effective meetings:

Generate easy-to-digest summaries of progress for stakeholders:

Sounds good? Great. Let’s get started!

A template, not a temple

The processes and workflows discussed provided training have been used on multiple successful projects. However, this is just an example process and workflow. We always end up modifying the process and workflows to meet the needs of the teams and products. It’s a starter template for product teams to adapt to meet their needs.

If you have improvements, please let us know!