Tips for Future Project Planning

When you're planning for a project that's a bit further in the future, there can be many unknowns - Do you have enough resources? Who's working on this project? Do you need to create Jira issues yet?

Here are some Resource Planning view features and workflow tips that can help you navigate in this unknown territory:

• Switch to the Weeks view to see the big picture, then use the date picker to set the planning period to show several months ahead.

• Ask your resources or team leads to plan their vacations and planned time off and add them to the calendar so that it's clear who's available when.

• Create a Jira project and basic epics for your future project. You don't need to create individual Jira stories or tasks yet.

• Capacity planning can be done on a higher level to see resource availability in the Resource Planning view. Each resource should be in the correct Workload scheme and Holiday scheme to determine their capacity. Note that Generic Resources cannot be added to workload or holiday schemes.

• Filter by Roles or Skills to help you find the resources you need for the project, even when you don't know which team or resource is available yet. And if there are no resources or skills appropriate for your project, this can signal that you need to hire some talent.

• If you know you'll be needing or hiring more resources, but they haven't started yet, you can create create Generic Resources. Then you can add them to Tempo teams, and assign them the required skills.

• Create high-level plans on the Jira project and its epics for Generic Resources or actual resources: click Project instead of Issue in the Plan Time form to plan time on projects. You can also configure the Issues side panel to add your Project on a tab so that you can see its epics and easily drag them to someone's timeline in the Resource Planning view.

• After plans are assigned to actual resources and Generic resources, you can run a Planned Time report to see who is working on which project and when.

• When you're ready to assign plans to specific resources, reassign the project plans you created earlier for the Generic Resources to the actual resources to secure their time for your project.

• When you have finally created Jira stories and issues for your project, you can edit any existing plans to swap out Jira projects or epics for specific Jira issues.