The following page may contain information related to upcoming products, features and functionality. It is important to note that the information presented is for informational purposes only, so please do not rely on the information for purchasing or planning purposes. Just like with all projects, the items mentioned on the page are subject to change or delay, and the development, release, and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of GitLab Inc.
| Stage | Plan |
| Maturity | Viable |
| Content Last Reviewed | 2024-09-18 |
Thanks for visiting this category direction page on Portforlio Management in GitLab. This page belongs to the Product Planning group of the Plan stage and is maintained by Amanda Rueda E-Mail.
This direction page is a work in progress, and everyone can contribute:
GitLab's vision is to provide tools that help our customers manage a portfolio of work and determine which opportunities have higher ROI when making strategic business planning decisions.
Enterprises work on complex initiatives that cut across multiple teams and departments, often spanning months, quarters, and even years. We support organizing initiatives into multi-level plans. We enable organizations to track efforts in flight and plan upcoming work to best utilize their resources and focus on the right priorities.
GitLab supports popular enterprise Agile portfolio and project management frameworks, including Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Scrum, and Kanban.
| Multi-level planning | Roadmaps | Kanban |
|---|---|---|
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Our 1 year focus is to provide planning solutions that provide visibility into the success of your plans, bridge the gap between different teams and empowers you to confidently make planning decisions. By focusing on this direction, we aim to deliver a range of features that streamline your workflows and empower every user to contribute meaningfully. Let's delve into the roadmap and discover how it will transform your project management experience!
Currently, we are diligently working on achieving feature parity to enable the migration of epics to work items. This migration will leverage the powerful capabilities of the work items framework, which establishes a common backend for records such as epics and issues. By harnessing this framework, we can provide a consistent and streamlined experience across various planning workflows in GitLab.
The best part is that you, as a user, won't have to take any action—we will seamlessly migrate your data. You may notice some differences in the user interface, but rest assured, these changes will enhance your overall experience.
The work items framework brings several benefits to the table. First, it enables the reuse of components, allowing for more efficient development and deployment of new features. This means that our team can deliver enhancements at an accelerated pace, and users will have a more consistent experience. Second, the framework enables easier hierarchical aggregation of data, enabling better organization and management of complex projects. Third, it minimizes maintenance overhead, ensuring a more stable and reliable platform.
Once migrated to the work items framework, we will automatically unlock a wide array of enhancements that will significantly boost your productivity and efficiency. For example, adding Assignees or Health Status to Epics will be fairly low effort. It will also be much simpler to introduce additional work item types, like Strategic Themes, to represent other critical objects in Portfolio Planning.
Following the successful implementation of work items, we will shift our focus to enhancing Enterprise Agile Planning workflows. Our plan includes the implementation of our vision for Improved Data Filtering and Visualization, empowering advanced capabilities to manage, retrieve and analyze your data effectively.
The Improved Data Filtering and Visualization initiative aims to address user problems related to navigating and filtering data by creating a centralized experience which provides users with a single page where they can effortlessly create complex queries and view data in various formats such as lists, grids, boards, and roadmaps. We aim to streamline the user experience and empower users to customize their data visualization according to their specific needs. Additionally, users will have the ability to save their built queries for personal or team use, fostering collaboration and enhancing productivity. With this initiative, we expect users to easily access and manipulate data, visualize it in meaningful ways, and accomplish their tasks with improved efficiency and clarity. In tandem with this initiative, we will look for opportunities to improve workflow efficiency by preventing the need to open multiple tabs during routine jobs to be done.
Furthermore, we are committed to improving GitLab's roadmap experience by incorporating comprehensive delivery planning features that our users have expressed a strong desire for. You can explore these exciting features here and we encourage you to leave your valuable feedback as well as any suggestions for additional features that may not have been mentioned. Your input is essential in shaping the future of our product to better meet your needs.
Looking ahead, we'll begin to work on our long-term vision of expanding dependency visibility throughout the planning and execution phases. With a comprehensive understanding of dependencies, you'll have better insights into potential bottlenecks and can proactively address them, create realistic and achievable roadmaps, align tasks and deliverables across teams and ultimately drive successful product development.
In summary, our direction involves migrating to work items, which will bring numerous benefits to your experience. We are committed to continuously improving our platform, and our focus will shift to enhancing Enterprise Agile Planning workflows once the epic migration to work items is complete. With our upcoming initiatives, including Improved Data Filtering and Visualization and comprehensive delivery planning features, we aim to provide you with a powerful and intuitive portfolio management experience. Furthermore, improved dependency visibility will empower you with even greater insights, control, and trust in your product plans.
In the next two years:
These UX Themes represent the JTBD we've decided are the most important for our users. We're working on features that improve on the ability to accomplish these goals.
| Theme | Persona | JTBD |
|---|---|---|
| Support product managers in configuring and sharing hierarchy of work items to increase alignment in how planned work is driving larger goals | Parker | When visualizing the plan of how my strategy will be implemented, I want to display how prioritized items cascade up toward larger vision and business objectives, so I can increase alignment on the overall impact and importance of even the most granular items within my plan. |
| Allow teams to group or relate work items to increase alignment on dependencies or related work. | Parker Delaney |
When splitting prioritized initiatives or features into requirements, I want to group related slices of value and surface dependencies, so I can maximize alignment on the scope of a business goal and efficiently plan its incremental delivery. |
| Decrease effort and time it takes for teams to identify and monitor impediments so that they may be better mitigated. | Delaney | When reviewing a plan, I want to identify and enable continual monitoring of high risk items, so I can maintain effectiveness of mitigation plans, even as they evolve. |
| Allow product managers to visualize and share progress and completion of goals in order to increase trust with stakeholders | Parker | When implementing to a plan, I need to monitor progress (velocity) so I can demonstrate that the team is efficiently capturing value for our stakeholders. |
| Increase alignment of teams by allowing them to visualize status of work within a workflow | Parker Delaney |
When collaborating with a team or stakeholders, I want to communicate the current status of work continuously, so I can increase alignment on progress and any impediments that need to be addressed. |
| Support teams in managing their capacity to increase predictability | Delaney | When planning a release, I want to prioritize and sequence estimated work based on feasibly, capacity, and ROI, so I can incrementally deliver toward business objectives. |
| Empower users to prioritize work that best drives value | Parker | When reviewing proposed initiatives, I want to categorize opportunities based on how efficiently they drive the success of business objectives, so I can increase confidence in items I have prioritized, and feel empowered to say no to less impactful ideas. |
| Increase alignment of teams by allowing teammates to easily update others on progress or status either manually or automatically | Sasha | When collaborating with a team or stakeholders, I want to maintain transparency to the status of work, to enable others to self-serve that information, and so I can increase alignment on progress and any impediments that need to be addressed. |
| Support product teams in crafting a SSOT with well-documented requirements | Parker | When planning a release, I want to prioritize and sequence estimated work based on feasibly, capacity, and ROI, so I can incrementally deliver toward business objectives. |
BIC (Best In Class) is an indicator of forecated near-term market performance based on a combination of factors, including analyst views, market news, and feedback from the sales and product teams. It is critical that we understand where GitLab appears in the BIC landscape.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Portfolio financial management | Visibility and insight into funding capacity rather than projects. Instead of determining how much it will cost to achieve the next two milestones, managers determine how much capacity is required to deliver a consistent flow of value. |
| Portfolio level planning | Identifying which programs to invest in, and how much. Portfolios are largely trying to figure out what initiative to fund, based on when the previous one is scheduled to finish. |
| Program level planning | Breaking large deliverables into chunks that make sense for each team and coordinating the teams' work. Programs need to worry about dependencies and coordination. |
| Enterprise agile framework (including SAFe) | SAFe support includes the processes, roles, and artifacts that enable scaling across teams, and the ability to plan and track work and assess economic benefits using at a minimum Portfolio SAFe in SAFe v. 5.0. EAP tools may support multiple enterprise agile frameworks commonly used in the industry. |
| Forecasting | A forecast is a calculation about the future completion of an item or items that includes both a date range and a probability. Forecasts take the progress to date of all of the programs, then make forward-looking predictions. |
| Dependency management | Dependencies are the relationships between work that determine the order in which the work items (features, stories, tasks) must be completed by Agile teams. Dependency management is the process of actively analyzing, measuring, and working to minimize the disruption caused by intra-team and / or cross-team dependencies. |
| Roadmapping | Roadmaps are the glue that link strategy to tactics. They provide all stakeholders with a view of the current, near-term, and longer-term deliverables that realize some portion of the Portfolio Vision and Strategic Themes. © Scaled Agile, Inc. |
| End-to-end visibility to the value stream | This capability indicates the tool’s ability to show the progress of software throughout the value stream from ideation through to production realization of the customer and business value. |
| Collaboration | Collaboration tools have the highest value for distributed organizations. These tools can range from virtual boards and team rooms to threaded conversations or advanced, work-item-context chat tools. |
| Area of focus | GitLab | Digital.ai | Planview | Jira Align |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio financial management | ⬜️ | 🟨 | 🟩 | 🟨 |
| Portfolio level planning | ⬜️ | 🟩 | 🟨 | 🟨 |
| Program level planning | ⬜️ | 🟩 | 🟨 | 🟩 |
| Enterprise agile framework (including SAFe) | 🟨 | 🟩 | 🟩 | 🟩 |
| Forecasting | ⬜️ | 🟨 | 🟨 | 🟩 |
| Dependency management | ⬜️ | 🟨 | 🟨 | 🟩 |
| Roadmapping | 🟨 | 🟩 | 🟨 | 🟩 |
| End to end visibility to the value stream | 🟨 | 🟩 | 🟨 | 🟩 |
| Collaboration | 🟩 | 🟨 | 🟨 | 🟩 |