Clear Path - Program for Solutions Partners
Common Use Cases for Clear Path
The ability to present information visually aligns with how most people naturally process data. This is why the adoption of visual media has grown exponentially across industries. However, Jira lacks comprehensive visual flow capabilities that could introduce an intuitive and seamless workflow experience.
With Clear Path, clients can visually manage dependencies in the backlog, understand your critical risks, and plan sprints effectively. This results in integrating advanced visual flow patterns into Jira that elevates its functionality, offering teams a higher level of clarity and efficiency in managing backlogs and dependencies.
And it is designed by, and developed for, Agile teams.
USE CASE #1
Building a Backlog
In product development, new features often require a series of 20 or more user stories to be implemented for the feature to be considered complete. Each user story should be written in a manner that follows INVEST best practices, and in a manner where value can be delivered incrementally – one story building upon another. The way the stories build upon each other defines an implementation order, which can be depicted visually, similar to a flow diagram.
By creating the work items in a manner that visually demonstrates the implementation, you gain:
Confidence that the work items are sliced in a way that provides clear, incremental value
Clarity on which work items are the priority to be implemented first
Understanding of which work items can be executed in serial versus parallel amongst multiple people
Insights into which work items will be problematic bottlenecks that limit your team’s utilization
And confidence in your ability to set a realistic schedule and stick to it
In Clear Path, you can create new Jira work items directly on our infinite canvas. After work items are created, blocking dependencies can quickly be added by dragging and dropping the links between the work items. If you make a mistake, you have multiple ways to visually correct the mistake on the canvas:
Select and delete an incorrect link
Select and drag either the source or destination of the link to a different work item
Select and Reverse the link direction
Once you are ready to see the work items organized in the implementation order the screen, click the Refresh button to get an updated layout.
Clear Path shows the unblocked work items at the top of the canvas, and these are the priority work items to get ready for development. Work items that must be executed in serial are displayed vertically, and work items that can be executed in parallel are shown horizontally. Work items in the middle or bottom of the canvas are lower priority for development and can wait to be designed and ready for development.
USE CASE #2
Estimating and planning a Product Increment without story point estimates
Accurate estimation of software delivery is challenging for almost every product team. From the experience of Moser Labs, the most accurate estimates generally take into account a few considerations:
Properly framing the known scope of the feature in the form of well sliced user stories
This is often dependent on the experience level and skill of the product team
A good understanding of the implementation order of the user stories
The average numbe of work items the team implements in a sprint
A buffer for evolving requirements, bugs, and rework
Why the average # of work items the team implements in a sprint? Just like an experienced team will gravitate towards a steady velocity (velocity is the average number of story points), teams will also gravitate toward slicing stories to an average size, making story points not as needed. Simply knowing the work item count per sprint is as good as having the velocity.
Clear Path helps teams estimate and plan a Product Increment through our Sprint Planning mode. You can switch to Sprint Planning mode by selecting the button on the mini-map control toolbar in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas.
Once in Sprint Planning mode:
Select the desired Jira board the sprints will be located
Enter the work item count you want to utilize for planning
As an example, at Moser Labs we plan for 2 work items a sprint per developer; therefore, a development team of 5 would enter an Issue Max of 10 (assuming minimal scope change will occur during development). If the team wants to account for our recommended buffer (20%) for evolving requirements, bugs, and rework, then an Issue Max of 8 is entered instead.
Select the Auto-plan pulldown and choose All Sprints. Clear Path will indicate the recommended number of sprints, and the work items contained within those sprints, to complete the Product Increment based on the entered data. When you click confirm, Clear Path will create the sprints and assign the work items to them, auto-magically.
USE CASE #3
Estimating and planning a Product Increment with story point estimates
Story Pointing is a common practice in Agile Scrum methodology that helps teams discuss the needed solution and understand how complex a story is, so they can set realistic expectations on delivery. The number of story points a team can execute in a given sprint is known as the team’s Velocity, and it is used as a guideline to help the team plan their work.
In Clear Path, you can use your team velocity to automatically plan your next sprint, or multiple future sprints, in our Sprint Planning mode. Select the Jira Board the sprints will reside on and enter your team’s Velocity. If you want to have a buffer to account for evolving requirements, bugs, and rework, decrease your velocity by the desired amount (we recommend 20%).
Select the Auto-plan pulldown and choose All Sprints. Clear Path will indicate the recommended number of sprints, and the work items contained within those sprints, to complete the Product Increment based on the entered data. When you click confirm, Clear Path will create the sprints and assign the work items to them, auto-magically.
USE CASE #4
Managing your backlog
Managing the backlog for a Product Increment is an essential responsibility of any Product Owner, Project Manager, or a team lead is responsible for getting work to the delivery team. To successfully deliver a project that stays on schedule and achieves the desired outcomes, it is important for the team members “upstream” from delivery to properly prioritize their work, so it is ready to handoff in time to the delivery team. These individuals can include: the Product Manager, Product Owner, UX Researchers, UI/UX Designers, or even architects.
Clear Path displays the work items needed earlier in the development cycle at the top of the canvas, and work items needed later in the development cycle at the bottom of the canvas. To ensure the development team stays on track for delivery, the Product Team, the Design team, and the architects can utilize Clear Path’s layout to get “the right” work items to the Definition of Ready to keep the development team on track, and keep your users and stakeholders happy with the consistent delivery of new features and improvements.
USE CASE #5
Bringing teams to a shared understanding, faster
Work items in Jira are like pieces of a puzzle, and the only person who understands how they fit together are the individuals who write the work items—in Agile scrum this is traditionally your Product Owner, but it could also be a Product Manager, a Business Analyst, or even an Engineering Manager.
In Agile scrum, the standard ceremonies of Backlog Refinement and Sprint Planning are geared for the team understand the work: the problems they are solving, who they are solving them for, and the priority of the problems being solved. For small enhancements or bugs, priority can easily be managed via the vertical order in the Jira backlog (AKA Rank) and the “Priority” field on the work items. But for larger project work, these attributes are insufficient. A high priority item to the business might be blocked by 5 or 6 other work items enable the highest priority item to be solved.
To execute a project, or deliver a Product Increment, you have to fully understand how each work item fits into the bigger picture. It’s hard to fully understand the work by looking at “lists” of work items in Jira backlogs and boards. Clear Path solves this by organizing Work issues in a simple, visual workflow that makes it easy to see how everything connects.
Clear Path utilizes data that is already entered into Jira to show the implementation order. Teams can see the summary information, click on work items to see the details and edit the details, and have meaningful discussions with less confusion. Teams come to a shared understanding faster, resulting in less meetings and more time delivering value.
USE CASE #6
Running Backlog Refinement
Backlog Refinement is a critical meeting for Agile teams to come to a shared understanding of the problems being solved in the work, the product design, and have discussions on the technical approach to solve the problem. A common problem team’s have is consistent estimations of story points, and a common cause of this is inconsistent assumptions of the implementation order of the work items.
For all significant new work, there is always some foundational work to that must be done to enable all the stories to be worked, and team members can inconsistently estimate which work items that effort occurs simply because of the order the work items are presented in Backlog Refinement.
The human mind thinks in time, and presenting data in chronological order makes it easier to comprehend and retain the information. Clear Path displays the work items in their implementation order, making it clear which work items have foundational work, and which work items build upon the foundation already laid. For the work item in the refinement session, the Product Owner can:
Step through each work item, showing how they incrementally build upon each other
Click on each work item to see all information the same as on the Jira Edit Issue screen
Edit all information displayed, including Story Points, and changes are applied directly in Jira
Clear Path will bring clarity to the team of how the work items are organized to be delivered, creating a “blueprint” for the team in how to deliver. Teams will have less confusion, teams will have deeper and more meaningful discussions, and they will require less time to conduct Backlog Refinement when they use Clear Path. Clear Path makes teams more efficient, enabling them to deliver more value, and deliver it faster. Estimates will become more in line with actual effort, and delivery schedules will be more accurately planned. Stakeholder will be delighted with the sense of certainty they receive in achieving their outcomes in the expected timeframe.
USE CASE #7
Work the truly highest priority items in Sprint Planning
Determining which work is truly the priority is a difficult task for many Agile teams. Perhaps there is a bug preventing a candidate release from being deployed, or an issue in Production that needs quick resolution for a high-profile customer. How do you juggle these items with your project work?
With Clear Path’s Sprint Planning mode, you can create your next sprint directly in our canvas. Drag and drop the critical issues outside of your project work, then use our Auto-plan function to finish the sprint. Clear Path’s auto-plan algorithm will consider which issues represent significant technical risk, schedule, and impact your team’s ability to work at full capacity. Just be sure to enter the team’s max velocity and issue count to get the most accurate results.
If you prefer to manually plan your sprints instead of using Clear Path’s auto-plan function, you are in luck. Clear Path allows you to drag and drop one or more work items to the desired sprints. As work items are added to sprints, warnings are evaluated to make you aware if you have exceeded your team velocity, issue max for the sprint, or if there is a dependency between work items that poses a risk to the sprint. Clear Path makes manually planning prints easy since Clear Path left aligns the most critical work items to your schedule – just drag and drop the left most work items from your backlog view.
USE CASE #8
Upskill Junior Product Owners
Senior Product Owners are hard to find. Clear Path helps you upskill your Junior Product Owners to Senior by helping them to think more critically about how their work items are sliced. Since Clear Path is a dependency first, visual first tool, Product Owners must be aware of how work items are intended to incrementally add value to the product. What can be implemented in parallel, versus what is dependent on each other. What should be entered into Jira for the benefit of the Product Owner, for their development team, and for the benefit of the stakeholders.
Clear Path makes it easy to evaluate a Product Owner’s work in Jira. Execute any JQL query to visualize the work items they have been working on.
Do they have the relationships entered?
Do they have the Parent’s entered?
Do they have too many work items in each Parent?
Does the implementation order seem correct?
Are the work items flagged with the correct Fix Version?
When is the projected release date?
Is the schedule risk being managed?
Is the technical risk being managed?
All of these are questions that can be answered in seconds while using Clear Path, allowing your team of Product Owners to meet best practices, work consistently across teams, and most importantly ensure the Product owners are providing the design and development the information they need to work efficiently and effectively.
USE CASE #9
Manage Schedule Risk and Technical Risk
Work items that drive your schedule can be identified two ways: schedule risk and technical risk.
Schedule Risk in Agile is identified by the longest chain of work items that must be executed in serial. Pressing the Critical Path by Sprints button in Clear Path will identify the longest series of work items that must be executed in serial. The button is named “Sprints” because in Agile scrum you generally don’t put two work items in the same sprint that block each other, so this path represents the minimum number of sprints for your team.
Technical Risk in Agile is identified by the sequential chain of work items that collectively have the highest number of story points. Pressing the Critical Path by Story Points button in Clear Path will identify the longest series of work items that must be executed in Serial. As work items are completed and you burn down your technical risk, you may find the path with the most technical risk may change.
In Visual Backlog mode, you can see the work items on either critical path at any time. When in Sprint Planning mode, Clear Path will automatically place the most critical work items in order, from left to right, on any given row in the backlog or sprint regions of the canvas.
When planning your sprints, it is important for work items on the critical path(s) to be prioritized and implemented at the beginning of the sprint; otherwise, you will find your schedule slipping.
USE CASE #10
Clear Bottlenecks
Bottlenecks are work items that prevent work from progressing forward, or that prevent your team from utilizing its full capacity to move priority work forward. In Clear Path, you can easily identify these work items using the Bottlenecks button. Pressing the button will highlight and enlarge the work items that are the largest bottlenecks in your visualization. In user settings, you can customize the minimum number of dependencies a work item must have to be considered a bottleneck (Bottleneck Threshold).
When planning your sprints, it is important that bottleneck work items are cleared early in the sprint, because the effects of a bottleneck work item being carried to the next sprint could be catastrophic to your schedule.
In Visual Backlog mode, you can see the Bottleneck work items at any time. When in Sprint Planning mode, Clear Path will automatically place the most critical work items in order, from left to right, on any given row in the backlog or sprint regions.
Manage your project as an Agile project
Most project planning tools rely on waterfall methodologies, such as Gantt charts and Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics. When waterfall practices are used on Agile projects, major additional costs occur on the project:
Getting inputs to create a detailed project plan and set EVM baselines requires the team to spend time performing upfront and detailed estimates in hours that are inherently inaccurate
Additional Time is spent reviewing estimates and putting them into a project plan
As week by week changes happen, replans must occur. This requires additional estimates, updating the plan, and meetings to update stakeholders on the changes.
A full-time role (Project Manager) is utilized to create what ends up being throwaway documentation (the Project Plan and history)
Teams fall into the sunk cost fallacy, choosing to not embrace change in direction when changing direction is the right thing to do. Teams waste more time following the failing plan, rather utilize the new information to adjust the approach to ensure the desired outcome is achieved
The time utilized to have staff perform and review estimates is direct cost to the project. The calendar time that is wasted delaying the start of the project or a pivot in the project is cost of delay preventing your Return on Investment from being realized sooner. In software product development, the rigid guardrails of waterfall project planning puts your product at a disadvantage.
Enter Agile project management. Agile uses story point estimation, not hours or days. Agile uses projections, not plans. Clear Path is designed to work in an Agile first and dependency first methodology. Use your team velocity to plan your sprints. Sequence your work based on what is actually unblocked, and avoid the mythical man month. Clear bottlenecks before they affect your delivery, and stay on schedule by implementing the work items on your critical path.
USE CASE #11
Replan Product Increments when they start falling behind
The development of a Product Increment can go smoothly or it can run behind. Underestimated efforts, unplanned vacation time, or delays from external vendors or stakeholders can create the need to replan your sprints. Replanning future sprints is easy in Sprint Planning mode.
Select the “Delete Future Sprints” option near the Auto-plan menu. Ensure your team Velocity and Issue Max are set to the desired amounts. Then select the Auto-plan Sprints pulldown, and the All Sprints option. Clear Path will automatically replan your future sprints, helping you get the best projection for your Product Increment.
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Help Your Clients Get More from Jira with Clear Path
As a Solution Partner, you're always looking for better ways to solve client challenges—especially those Jira can’t handle alone. Clear Path for Jira helps Agile teams estimate more accurately, clear roadblocks faster, and reduce time in meetings.
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