Planning item overview

Introduction to Planning Items

Planning Items bridge the gap between your journey maps and your team's planning tools (project management/task/ALM). By linking live data from platforms such as Jira and Azure DevOps you can seamlessly integrate project tracking into your journey maps, enabling better collaboration, prioritization, and visualization.

What are Planning Items in Journey Mapping? 🤔

Planning Items are connections to epics, stories, tasks, or work items from your favorite planning tools. They allow you to:

• Visualize live project information directly on your journey map

• Track the progress of tasks in the context of your customer journey

• Enhance collaboration by aligning teams around shared goals

• Highlight priorities, responsibilities, and statuses within your journey

Quick look at adding Planning Items 👀

Adding a planning item from Jira

Connected Tools and Data 🔗

Smaply integrates with leading project management platforms to ensure you can bring live, actionable data into your journey maps:

1. Jira

2. Azure DevOps

3. Asana

4. Trello

5. Linear

With more being worked on all the time... Missing your favorite? 💡Add an ideas to our ideas board here!

How to use Planning Items 🛠️

Planning Items can be used in two main ways:

1. As a Lane: Create a dedicated lane for Planning Items to visualize tasks or work items alongside other journey map data.

2. As Cards in Existing Lanes: Add Planning Items to existing lanes to enhance context and show their relevance to specific stages of the customer journey.

When you add a planning card to a map, you can search for the item by ID or by its title in the source system (such as Jira or Asana).

What Information Can You Display? 📋

Planning Items bring in rich data from your tools, such as:

• Assignee: Who is responsible for the task

• Status: Current progress (e.g., "In Progress," "Done")

• Type: Type of work (e.g., Bug, Feature, Task)

• Priority: Level of importance or urgency

Need more? 💡Add an ideas to our ideas board here!

Examples of Use Cases 🌟

1. Aligning Teams: Show work progress to cross-functional teams in the context of customer journeys.

2. Spotting Bottlenecks: Identify stages with too many unresolved tasks or critical delays.

3. Prioritizing Efforts: Use Planning Items to focus on high-priority actions that directly impact customer experiences.

By integrating Planning Items, your journey maps become a living document that connects customer insights with actionable project data, driving both strategy and execution. Learn how to configure you're integrated planning tools here Planning tools