Planning sidebar

This sidebar panel is available when viewing/editing a Plan in the Work Items Table view, and when editing a Document. The Planning sidebar is opened automatically by the Open in Table action. (Actions menu, or Open in Table widget in a Plan. Cannot be invoked from a Document.)

The Planning sidebar enables you to load any open Plan in the table, or open its page. This can be useful when you are planning Work Items for a release or iteration. You can easily check any plan to see what Work Items have been added to it and what the workload is like, and to add or remove Work Items in different Plans until you have a release plan and any iteration sub-plans populated as you think best for successful a execution.

Refer to the following figure when browsing the next sections in this topic.

Selection in Open Plans. (Click to open this Plan.)

Plan from a different project.

Add or Remove item(s) selected in the table from the Plan selected in Open Plans.

Save changes to all modified Plans.

Current selection in Open Plans. (Click icon to load Plan in Table.)

Cancel changes to all modified Plans.

Selected Plan title

The first element in the sidebar is the title of the Plan currently selected in the Open Plans list. The title is a hyperlink that will open the respective Plan in the Plans topic of the project. The ID of the Plan is also shown. This can be useful for developers needing to find the ID to cite it in a macro in a custom report page, or in an API call.

Selected Plan work statistics

After the Plan title and ID, the Planning sidebar shows several statistics about the Plan currently selected in Open Plans.

  • Items: a count of the number of Work Items currently planned for processing in the selected Plan.

  • Planned: the amount of work estimated for all Work Items in the selected Plan. The metric may be time, or something else defined in an estimation field, depending on the configuration in the Plan properties.

  • Unplanned: Reports the Capacity (defined in plan properties) minus planned work. Planned work is the sum of all work already done and still to be done in the Plan.

Add / Remove buttons

These buttons can be used to add Work Items currently listed in the Table to the Plan currently selected in the Planning sidebar. Keep in mind that the Plan currently loaded in the Table may not be the Plan currently selected in the sidebar. Observe the Query Builder in the table to see if the Planned In query element is present. If so, then the Work Items in the table are already added to the Plan specified in the query. Normally, you should not add items from that Plan to some other Plan selected in the sidebar, without first removing it from the queried Plan.

Assuming the query in the table is not fetching items that are already planned, you can add items from the table to any open Plan by first selecting it in the Open Plans tree in the sidebar. Select one or more items in the Table, and click the Add button. Alternatively, you can drag items from the Table to the Planning Sidebar to add them to the currently selected Plan.

If the Plan loaded in the Table is the same as the Plan selected in the sidebar, you can select items in that Plan for removal from it. Select the items to remove, and click the Remove button in the sidebar.

Remember that no Plan is actually updated with changes made in the Planning sidebar until the changes are saved via the Save button. The button shows a count of Plans that have changes pending.

Open the Plans tree

This section of the Planning sidebar is a scrollable list of currently open Plans in the current project. If any Plan has child Plans, its node can be expanded or collapsed to show or hide the child Plans. If a plan is one in a different project that has been included in the currently-viewed plan, the ID of that project appears in parentheses after the Plan name.

Selecting a Plan in the tree shows its current work statistics. It is important to note that selecting a Plan here does not load its Work Items in the Table. If you want to do that, hover over the Plan when it is selected in the tree, and click on the icon that appears (Show Plan Work Items in Table).

The Save button

You can use the Planning sidebar to jump around among different Plans and make changes (add Work Items, remove Work Items). However, no Plan is actually updated until you click this button. The button label displays a count of how many Plans have changes pending.

Cancel & Close Link

Clicking this link cancels all unsaved changes to all Plans, and closes the Planning sidebar. You can reopen the sidebar from the Sidebar drop-down menu, located to the right of the Query Builder in the Work Items Table view.