Initiative Roadmap

An initiative roadmap gives you a visual overview of your product plan at the Portfolio level. This allows teams to see how all of their development efforts roll up into a larger initiative and stakeholders can see how their strategic initiatives roll down to stories and epics being worked on by each team in the Agile Release Train.

An initiative roadmap is critical for planning and can also be used as a status report.

VisualScript's Initiative Roadmap connects a team's development efforts with large scale Initiatives and Feature development for the Agile Release Train. With VisualScript, you can build your initiative roadmap easily from existing Jira data. VisualScript also integrates with other apps you may have installed. You can integrate with Advanced Roadmaps (Portfolio) to use the "Team" and "Parent Link" fields and also with Tempo Timesheets to use their "Team" field.

To generate an Initiative Roadmap using VisualScript, you'll need VisualScript installed on your Jira instance. Once VisualScript is added to your instance, you can add a VisualScript gadget to your dashboard. When the VisualScript gadget is added to a dashboard, you'll see a list of available reports to run. The built-in reports will be in a folder called "Built-In Reports". Choose "Jira Initiative Roadmap" to add to your dashboard.

VisualScript will need a few bits of data before it generates the report. Let's look at these parameters and what they mean:

1. Project key(s): assume one project for all issues or one for Initiatives and one for Epics and Stories
2. FixVersions: lets you filter program increments so you can create a time box around your report
3. Choose whether you want to show Epics: true/false
4. Team filter: leave blank to show all
5. Team field: specify if you want to use Component, Project Key, Advanced Roadmaps for Jira, Tempo or Custom
6. Data type: choose whether you want to track by story points or time
7. ParentLink: Choose how an Epic is linked to an Initiative. The default selection is "Relates", but you can also use the "Advanced Roadmaps - Parent Link".

The resulting visual is a Gantt chart that shows the relationships between Initiatives and Epics. At the top level you'll see our Initiatives followed by its child Epics and each hyperlinked to the actual Issues in Jira. You'll also see Team assignments rolled up for each Epic. Estimates show you the story points rolled up for each Epic and rolled up to the Initiative. Start and end dates are based on the FixVersions selected in the parameters. The percentage completed is shown numerically as well as visually using a bar for each Epic and Initiative. The incomplete portion is shown as purple while the completed portion shows as black. An Epic at 100% complete would be a full black bar.

The power of VisualScript's roadmap is you can get this report all from existing Jira data. You can filter the information you display by team and Program Increment to help you make better data-driven decisions easier all inside Jira, your single source of truth for your development plans and reporting.

While VisualScript offers a turn-key, no-code Initiative Roadmap solution that will work out of the box for many teams, you can also easily make adjustments to create a custom roadmap.

VisualScript comes with a built-in SDK that makes it easy to generate custom reports that fit your teams' needs. We even have friendly engineers who will help you get started.