A series on successful project management with Jira - Part Two: Successfully managing the three planning horizons: short, medium, and long-term

Following on from part one in this series on getting your project management right, this blog takes a deeper dive into the three planning horizons that you need to consider when planning your projects.

These are:

• Long-Term: Product Roadmapping

• Medium-Term: Delivery Planning

• Short-Term: Execution and Tracking

Long-Term: Product Roadmapping

Product Roadmapping is vital as it enables companies to form tactical plans which deliver  their strategy and goals. The roadmap considers the lifecycle of the portfolio of products and the factors that impact them.  

Product Roadmapping addresses the following questions:

• Which products should we bring to market and when?

  • This considers the product lifecycle, which factors in the current portfolio of products and when they need to be replaced (‘end of life’), as well as external factors such as new technologies, competitor landscape, market trends, and more. (Check out my blog Are you roadmapping? If not, you should be!)

• What resources do we have or need to get to deliver the products?

  • What products can we deliver with the resources that are currently available?

  • If we need further resources or to outsource parts of the product development to third parties(check out my blog Looking for engineering resources?), this needs to be planned in advance.

  • For roadmapping, you don’t need the details of which individual resources are designated for each specific task. Instead, you estimate how many resources are required from the different disciplines during the development of the project.  But if you have overlapping product development projects, you will need to ensure that there are sufficient resources where they overlap.

Medium-Term: Delivery Planning

At the delivery planning phase, you plot the project in more detail.  

Delivery planning addresses the following questions:

• To develop the product, what is the sequence of activities that need to take place, by who, and by when?

  • Here we are drilling down to the task level considering work/effort and duration, and resourcing at the individual team member level.

  • This feeds into execution and tracking, showing which tasks need to be done in the next sprint.

• Changes from execution and tracking to determine the impact and to decide how the plan should be updated.

Short-Term: Execution and Tracking

Execution and tracking focus on getting the planned tasks done and utilises Scrum. 

Execution and tracking help to address the following questions:

• What should we be working on this week?

  • From the Delivery Plan, which items in the backlog should be included in the sprint backlog?

• Are we delivering to the plan?

  • Schedule: has it taken longer than planned?

  • Work: has it taken more resources than we planned?

• What is the impact of the changes?

  • Changes can include taking longer, using more resources, additional requirements being added (‘scope creep’), impacts from other projects, priority changes, etc.

  • The changes are then fed back into delivery planning which supports decision making. The plan is then updated to reflect those changes.

Watch this space for the final part in this series, where I will talk about some tools you can use with Jira as solutions to your project management challenges.