Plans

Organize your epics by initiative, to see health and forecast for programs of work

Plans provide a way to organize and track epics. A plan allows you to:

• Define, manage and prioritize epics;

• See at a glance the progress, health, and forecast time to complete of your epics, as well as the plan as a whole;

• Measure how quickly and efficiently epics are completed.

Creating a plan

To create a plan, simply give it a name and press enter. Click the plan to open.

Note that you may create as many plans as you like. However, usually you'll need only one plan at a time. Except perhaps for very large organizations, it's uncommon to have multiple active plans. More common is a single plan that is used to manage the work of, say, a calendar year. At the end of the year, the plan can be marked as completed, and a new plan created for the coming year.

There are three ways to define, view and manage epics in a plan:

Tree

For new plans, start here. This is the first tab at the top of the plan page:

The starting tab (Tree mode) for a plan

Here you first create an initiative, under which you can then add existing epics from Jira, or create new ones. An initiative is simply a way to organize epics in a way that makes sense to you—examples include OKRs, or a key outcome, etc. You can have as many initiatives as you like.

The tree mode provides for a hierarchical layout of your epics. In a plan, epics are grouped by initiatives you define (e.g. “Q4 OKRs” or “v3 Product Release”).

Plans: "tree" mode

To adjust which columns are displayed, as well as their order, choose the equalizer icon in the upper-left of the plan:

Customize the plan columns you want to see

You may also export this view of the plan to a .pdf file, to share with stakeholders. The .pdf will mirror your chosen column selections and any applied filters.

Export your plan to .pdf, to share with stakeholders

If you create a new epic in a Socratic plan, and then want that epic to appear in Jira, simply choose the Jira project for it in the Project column. Socratic will sync the epic to that project automatically.

Timeline

See epics and forecasts in Gantt-style

The timeline provides a Gantt-style view of plan epics. The bar for each epic depicts start and end date (when set), as well as work progress. The darkest color is completed work; the lighter color is work in an active state. The dotted bar extension reflects Socratic's intelligent forecast for when the epic is likely to complete:

Timeline bars show start and end date, as well as work progress and forecast complete date

To change the time scale of your timeline, simply select Month, Quarter, or Year in the upper-right of the page.

Managing a plan

As epics are prioritized and work begins, all the issues those epics contain, and all the work activity on those issues, is synchronized in real-time from Jira. You get a single, unified view of health and progress across the plan’s epics, updated in real-time.

There are three primary indicators of epic health:

• Progress: the progress bar shows the percentage of issues complete. The darker portion of the bar represents completed work; the lighter portion represents tickets in an active (i.e. In Progress) status; the grey portion is work in a backlog (i.e. To Do) status.

• Momentum: shows at a glance what work is moving versus stalling or regressing. Momentum is designed to complement progress. How? Progress usefully reflects current state, but it doesn't tell you change over time. For instance, if the progress bar for a given epic shows 25 percent complete, a key question is: where were we two weeks ago? If the answer is, say, 15 percent complete, then 25 percent is good progress. But if two weeks ago our progress was 23 percent, then 25 percent now isn't much! Momentum pairs with progress to show you whether the rate of work completion is speeding up, stalling out, or going backward.
• Forecast: here, we use historical actuals coupled with machine learning (not story points!) to predict how long the epic is likely to take to complete. If you assign a due date to an epic in Socratic, we will also show which epics are on track and which are running late.

Socratic lets you see at a glance the health of your active epics

The plan health card provides quick filters for both Momentum and Forecast. This way you can see at a click anything that’s trending late or slowing. These filters can be used together—e.g. you could click both “Down” and “Off Track” to see just epics whose momentum is slowing and whose forecast is running late.

Filter a plan to see epics by their Momentum and/or Forecast status

The People tab shows all people working on epics that are part of the plan; the Issues tab shows every issue associated to an epic in the plan.

The Trends tab provides Trends analysis for all the work specific to the plan—especially useful for diagnosing anything impacting the rate of progress for a given epic.