Realistic View of Annual Planning Roadmap

What is the challenge?

When we do annual planning, we do it in the form of EPICs. We typically arrange these into one or more planning releases (e.g., 2025, Q1 2025, 2H 2025, etc.). At this stage few have features under them, which is fine. As we work through each quarter’s planning sessions during the year, those EPICs get pulled into standard monthly work releases for the quarter and have features defined under them. they then inherit their dates from the downstream features.

During annual planning, we want to set the EPIC dates based on the dates of the associated planning releases. This requires that their date calculation method be Manual. We can default their date calculation method to Manual, but populating the dates still requires a bulk change, albeit one time annually. We’ve done that.

When we pull those EPICs into work releases during our quarterly planning exercises, we want their dates to be driven by the associated features, which requires that their date calculation method be changed to From Features. All of that can also be done with bulk change, but it relies on someone doing it. EPICs do not have the option of getting their dates from the release dates and their associated features generally span multiple monthly releases.

What is the impact?

Roadmaps are often incorrect due to date hygiene issues, lowering confidence on timing of availability of new capabilities.

Describe your idea

My idea to deal with the latter was to create an automation rule that when a feature was attached to an EPIC, the EPIC’s associated date calculation method is changed to From Features, but the date calculation method is not accessible at present from our automations – standard variables for EPICs are very limited. Is there any way to make it accessible?