Administrators can now define Program Increments and Sprints centrally on an Agile Program Model, so that all connected Agile Programs automatically follow the same planning structure. This eliminates the need to manually create and maintain increments and sprints in each individual Agile Program.
When an Agile Program follows its model’s increments, any changes made to the model — such as adding a new increment — are automatically reflected across all connected programs. This keeps planning aligned and reduces repetitive setup work.
Define increments and sprints on the model
As an administrator, you can now configure whether increments and sprints should be managed centrally from the ART model or remain editable on each individual Agile Program.
Open the model configuration for your Agile Program Model and set the increments and sprints option:
- Follow model — all connected Agile Programs use the increments and sprints defined on the model. Program managers cannot add, edit, or remove increments locally.
- Editable in agile program (default) — each Agile Program manages its own increments and sprints independently, as before.
Migration dialog for existing programs
When you enable Follow model on a model that already has connected Agile Programs, those programs may contain features linked to old, locally created increments or sprints. A migration dialog helps you transition smoothly.
When a program manager opens the PI Planning or Roadmap tab on an affected Agile Program, a dialog appears showing:
- A list of increments/sprints that contain non-completed items, that no longer exist in the model
- For each increment/sprint, a dropdown to select which model increment or sprint the old one needs to be mapped to
The system uses smart matching to automatically suggest the best match based on increment and sprint names. If the names in the model closely match the old local names, the mapping is pre-filled for you.
- Open the Agile Program that follows the model.
- Navigate to the PI Planning or Roadmap tab.
- Review the migration dialog that appears.
- Verify or adjust the suggested mappings for each increment/sprint.
- Select Items to save to confirm the migration.
Automatic velocity creation
When a new increment is added to the model, velocities are automatically created for all connected Agile Programs. The velocity values are copied from the previous increment, so you don’t need to set them up manually each time.
Velocities are always managed per team on each individual Agile Program — not on the model itself. The same applies to estimation settings: these remain local to each program.
What changes for program managers
When an Agile Program follows its model’s increments:
- Increment and sprint selectors across the application (PI Planning, Roadmap, card detail dialogs, list views) show increments and sprints from the model
- The Add increment, Edit increment, and Remove increment actions are hidden — only the administrator can manage these on the model
- If the model has no increments configured yet, a message is shown asking you to contact your administrator
If your Agile Program does not follow a model, nothing changes. You continue to manage increments and sprints as before.
Best practices
- Align increment and sprint names between the model and existing Agile Programs before enabling “Follow model”. This helps the smart matching fill in the migration dialog automatically.
- Enable Follow model on one program first to verify the migration before rolling it out to all programs.
- Review velocities after migration to make sure the automatically copied values match expectations for each team.
FAQ
What happens when the model adds a new increment?
All connected Agile Programs automatically receive the new increment. Velocities for the new increment are created by copying each team’s velocity from the previous increment.
Do I need to migrate all items at once?
Yes. The migration dialog appears each time you open the PI Planning or Roadmap tab if there are still items linked to old increments. This means you can postpone the mapping, however it is not possible to do the mapping over multiple sessions.
