How can I impose my scheduling?
Asked by Tal Koren:

I have an epic which I plan to break into stories. Each story will have a different assignee. However, at this stage, I only have a high-level description of the epic, and I haven't broken it into stories yet (and probably won't in the next two weeks). This epic has an assignee in Jira, because I want it to appear in his boards. This assignee is also a team member in portfolio.

I want to be able to include this epic in my plan, however:

If I fill in a time estimate for the epic, portfolio treats it as work that should be done by one guy -- the current epic assignee -- which causes it to get scheduled far in the future (because this assignee has a bunch of other tickets under his name).

If I set a target end date instead of an estimate, portfolio still uses the version's scheduled end date as the ticket's end date. This version is a dummy version for continuous development tasks that we use because we don't want tasks to be automatically assigned to other releases, and its scheduled end date is, too, far in the future.

I want to be able to either impose fix start and end dates for this epic, or instruct portfolio to use the estimate and ignore assignee capacity (specifically for this epic, not for all tickets).

This sounds like a must-have capability for long term planning (which is part of portfolio's declared offering), because epics are typically broken into stories relatively late in the planning process, so I assume that portfolio enables it, but don't know how. Would appreciate any assistance.

Thank you.


Answers:
author: Bree Davies
body: Hi Tal,

Is it possible to remove the dummy version assignment just for this issue?

Without this, we'll apply the target start and target end dates you've also added to the issue and you'll be able to 'force' the dates as you'd like (assuming you also don't have an estimate on the issue).

In addition, inside your plan configuration (on the scheduling config page, in the section titled 'scheduling options'), what do you have your 'issue assignee import level' set to?

Thanks,  
Bree

With regards to your

comments: author: Tal Koren
body: Hi Bree,

I cannot remove the dummy version, because I want to prevent the issue from being assigned to a release. It's important for us that when we filter by release we see only what we plan to release, without any additional automatically assigned items.

The issue assignee import level is epic. This is because we want team leaders to be able to filter the scope view to see only their team's issues.


author: Bree Davies
body: Hi Tal,

In this case we have a mix of 'strict' assignments which Portfolio is trying to respect (your release assignment and also team member assignment) combined with what you actually want to reflect on your schedule, which is your target start and target end dates.

Some ideas:

* If you change your issue assignee import level to be 'not used' (or story) you could still filter issues by team without having the epic assignee taken into consideration (and expanding your timeline given they are also allocated to a bunch of other work).
* You could also use the Portfolio Team field, and assign specific shared teams to Jira issues which would also be respected by Portfolio but not produce the very specific result you have now given there is an individual person assigned to the work.
* Create a new release which is more aligned with the date range of this task and others of a similar priority, and assign this work to that release.

Impact:

The impact of implementing either of these options will be that the duration of your epic will match the duration of your release.

Currently, the only way to 'overwrite' the date range that's associated with your release is to remove the 'strict' release assignment altogether - leaving the target start and target end dates to be visualised on your schedule.

My email is bdavies@atlassian.com if you would like to take this one offline?

Thanks,  
Bree


author: Joel Feldman
body: Hi Tal,

Given your updates above, you might want to consider voting for this issue I entered regarding automatic assignment of backlog items to a release: JPOSERVER-2064 ([https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2064)](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2064)?)


Tags: advanced-roadmaps