Jürgen,

I tried to summarize some of the fundamentals here: https://jazz.net/wiki/bin/view/Deployment/RTCProcessFundamentals#Planning_Fundamentals
That is my understanding, not necessarily that of all.

I would like to approach this a bit different. If you are planning you will have goals, things you want to achieve on a higher level. Then there are things you have to do to achieve the goals.

Plan items are basically to express the higher level achievements, goals, features, stories whatever you call them. In planning you want to have an overview what the major contributions to the plan are. You often don't want to be distracted by all the details. Such a goal should be planned on a level that can be done in an iteration. You can use a breakdown e.g. Epic->Story->Story to break a huge plan item down into smaller pieces you can actually do in such an iteration.

(Agile) Effort estimation has the idea that humans are really good at estimating a rough ballpark number 1 point, 2 pint, 3 point, 5, 10, ... but for a lot of things they are bad at estimating 1 hour, two hours etc. The bigger the numbr the bigger the estimation error. Will this work take 100 hours or 120? So the idea is to have such a complexity at the plan level with fewer choics the higher the numbers to account for the fuzziness of estimating. You can use an enumeration or an integer. If you use an integer you should be aware of how bad humans are estimating at that high level for big numbers.


Execution items is the details what you have to do to get the plan items done. In the execution items you want to track the details. You want to be able to split the plan items in many tasks you have to do to finish them. Tasks should be small enough to be done by one person and ideally you should be able to estimate how long they take.

As far as I can tell, in RTC you flag the plan items in the planning configuration. All other item types are considered execution items. You can change the decision any time. There are some reasonable decisions already taken in the process templates.

Roll up using parent child only works within one project area.

On Plan item level the complexity is rolled up. If you have a very abstract level such as Epic, that item can be specified as top level item with no complexity on its own, so that the complexity of the child plan item (stories) is the collective complexity. Plan items usually don't have an estimate, corrected estimate  etc.

Execution items don't have a complexity, they may have an estimate, corrected estimate, time spent,... The roll up (within a project area) allows to roll estimations and tracked time up to the plan item level.

There is cross project planning using tracks/contributes To links, where the link allows to track plan items in this plan to plan items in other project areas. Too much for here.

There is a bunch of stuff I don't know that I don't know. So I can't tell you if you are missing something. I would suggest to have some small systems with the JKA Banking/Money that matter example to play around with. It has some data to start with and some plans. There are also various articles in the library. I think I put some into the fundamentals article.

I personally think the differentiation in plan items and execution items is useful. It allows to filter out details or focus on details. I also like the complexity versus the real effort tracking (says one of the worst planners and estimators on the planet).

If you play around with this, be aware that adding attributes can not be really reversed. But RTC should give you some flexibility to change things back and forth.