Create plans in Jira
10 min
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Create a simple plan
- Create work items in plans
- Describe how teams interact with plans
Create a plan
To create a plan in Jira, you only need to have the spaces, boards, or filter that include work or team members you want to plan work for.
To create a plan in Jira:
- In the sidebar, next to Plans, click Create plan (represented by a + icon).
- Enter a name for your plan.
- Configure access by selecting Private or Open.
- Add work to your plan, either a space, board, or filter. Optionally, select a specific team to narrow the plan's data further. You can update this later.
- Add more work if you want.
- Click Create.
- If more screens appear, click Skip and go to plan in the top left corner.
Once you’ve created a plan, next to the plan name click More actions (represented by ···), then Plan settings to make changes.
👇Click the tabs below to explore some plan settings.
You can update the scope of work included in your plan here by adding spaces, boards, and filters, or removing them. You can also see how many work items are in your plan here.
To prevent timing out, a single plan can load up to 5,000 work items, 100 spaces, and 50 shared teams.
Add data to plans
You can create work directly in your plan if you need to add information while you’re planning. You can only add work items to spaces associated with your plan.
To create work items in a plan, you can either:
- At the top of the Work item panel of the timeline view, click Create work.
- Or, in the Work item panel of the timeline view, next to an existing story or epic, click More actions (represented by •••), then Create.
👇These are the two ways you can create work items in a plan.
You can change the values of multiple work items at the same time using bulk actions.
If you add work items to your Jira spaces through a plan, you need to commit the changes to Jira before they’ll actually appear in spaces. The Unsaved changes button will appear at the top right corner of the timeline view. If you click it, you can see all of the changes you’ve made but not yet saved to Jira. You can select individual changes and discard or save them as needed.
You can also click the work item key for more details on what changed. If you leave one or more items unselected, they won't apply to your space and you can decide about them later.
👇You can review your changes individually and save or discard them.
Plans will always update to reflect changes made elsewhere in Jira. You won’t need to accept changes made outside of a plan.
Compare plans in company-managed and team-managed spaces
Company-managed spaces can utilize the full functionality of plans. Team-managed spaces have several small differences:
- You can’t use fields created in a team-managed space in plans. You can use global fields created by Jira admins.
- Work items in team-managed spaces can only have a parent epic from that same space, and they can’t use additional hierarchy levels above epics.
- You can’t use statuses and work types created in team-managed spaces in exclusion rules. Therefore, exclusion rules created using statuses and work types will only impact work items from company-managed spaces. This applies even if the statuses or work types appear to have the same name; for example, work items with the “In Progress” status in a team-managed space will not be excluded by exclusion rules that use the “In Progress” global status.
Add users to plans
In plans, a team represents a group of individuals working together on specific organizational tasks, spaces, or initiatives. Teams are used to organize and allocate resources, track work, and manage capacity within a plan.
You can either add an existing Atlassian team or create a new one. An Atlassian team is available across the organization and can be referenced in other plans and Atlassian apps.
If you create a team, you can either create a new Atlassian-wide team or create a plan-only team that won’t be available outside of your plan.
You can’t implement changes made in plans, like work assignment, if you use a plan-only team. You can convert a plan-only team to an Atlassian team. See Atlassian Documentation for more information.
To create a team in a plan:
- In the plan navigation, click Teams.
- Click Add team.
- Click Create a new team.
- Select Plan-only or Available across organization.
- Name the team and add members.
- Click Create team.
Configure a planning style for your team
When you add a team to your plan, you'll select a planning style for them. This determines how the plan estimates and schedules work.
👇Click the tabs below to explore the differences between planning styles.
For kanban teams, you can configure how many hours of work your team completes in a single week.