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Overview

Cross-project planning lets you bring work items from several sub-projects onto one board, giving program managers and Scrum masters a unified view of capacity and scheduling across teams. The board uses the Project (PROJECT) assignment mode to split swimlanes by sub-project, while a shared Plan query selects which Plans appear as columns.
Cross-project Planningboard with one swimlane per sub-project (Team A, Team B, Team C) and Sprint 1-3 Plan columns, showing work items distributed into each team/sprint cell
The Project (PROJECT) assignment mode includes only readable sub-projects within the current project group. It does not include the current project itself, and it cannot reach projects outside the group hierarchy.

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Prerequisites

  • Planningboard is installed and licensed in your Polarion instance.
  • Your Planningboard page lives inside a project group that contains the sub-projects you want to plan across.
  • You have permission to read work items in each sub-project.
  • You are familiar with adding a Planningboard widget to a LiveDoc page. See Create Your First Planningboard if not.
1

Open the widget configuration

  1. Navigate to the LiveDoc or Wiki page that hosts your Planningboard widget.
  2. Expand the widget tools and click Edit to open the widget configuration panel.
2

Set the Plans mode to Project Plans

In the Plans (Columns) section of the widget configuration:
  1. Set Plans Mode to Project Plans (PROJECT_PLANS).
    This is the default mode. It loads Plans from the current project using a Lucene query and organizes them chronologically as columns.
  2. Adjust how many past and future Plans appear on the board using the Last Plans and Next Plans counters:
    The defaults show one completed Plan and five upcoming Plans. Increase nextPlans if your planning horizon spans more sprints.
  3. Optionally, add a Plans Query to restrict which Plans appear as columns. For example, to show only sprint Plans:
The plan items section in the configuration panel appears only when plansMode is set to PROJECT_PLANS. If you switch to a SAFe mode, those options are hidden.
3

Set the assignment mode to Project

In the Swimlanes (Rows) section:
  1. Set Assignment Mode to Project (PROJECT).
    The board will create one swimlane per readable sub-project within the current project group. The current project itself is excluded.
When using Project (PROJECT) assignment mode with planCellsMode, verify your setup against the live product — normalization behavior in cross-project configurations is not confirmed in the source context.
4

Configure the work item query

In the Work Items Dataset section, set a Lucene query that targets the work item types you want to plan across all sub-projects:
Adjust the type and status filters to match your project’s work item type IDs. The maxItems parameter (default: 1000) limits the total number of work items loaded across all sub-projects:
If you have many sub-projects, the combined result set may reach maxItems before all sub-projects are fully represented. Tighten your query (for example, restrict by iteration date or status) or increase maxItems to compensate.
5

Handle the cross-project plan loading workaround

There is a known Polarion issue where selecting a plan template from another project causes the page to become unresponsive. If you encounter this symptom, apply the following workaround at the global Polarion administration level (not at the project level):
This configuration property must be added in the global Polarion administration settings — not inside a project’s context.properties. Applying it at the project level has no effect.
6

Save and verify

  1. Save the widget configuration.
  2. The board reloads. You should now see:
    • One column per Plan that matches your plansQuery, ordered chronologically.
    • One swimlane per sub-project within the project group.
    • Work items distributed into the cell that corresponds to their assigned Plan and their source sub-project.
  3. Verify that all expected sub-projects appear as swimlanes. If a project is missing, confirm that your Polarion user account has read access to that sub-project.

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Configuration example

The following widget parameter set configures a cross-project Planningboard showing the last sprint and the next four sprints, grouped by sub-project, displaying only Stories that are not yet done:

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Drag-and-drop across projects

Once the board is set up, drag-and-drop works as on a single-project board:
  • Drag a card from the Unplanned sidebar onto a Plan column to assign it to that sprint.
  • The card stays in its sub-project swimlane — dragging horizontally changes the Plan assignment; dragging vertically changes the swimlane (resource) assignment, which in Project (PROJECT) mode is not applicable for cross-project moves.
Cards with the Verified status are locked on the board and cannot be dragged or unplanned, regardless of which project they belong to.
See Drag and Drop Planning for full drag-and-drop reference.

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Limitations

  • Project (PROJECT) assignment mode excludes the current project. Only sub-projects within the group are shown.
  • No multi-assignee swimlane split in Project mode. Unlike the Users (Assignee) (ASSIGNEE) mode, the Project (PROJECT) mode shows one swimlane per project — it does not further subdivide by assignee within each project.
  • Capacity bars require additional setup. Capacity tracking across multiple projects is not automatically configured; see Configure Capacity Tracking for setup steps.
  • Cross-project plan template selection may trigger a Polarion responsiveness issue — apply the nextedy.planningboard.workaround_siemens_issue_global_plans=false property as described in Step 5.

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See also

KB Articles
  • Introduction to Planningboard
  • Planningboard interface & basic interactions
  • How to setup Planningboard into existing projects (based on E-library template)
Support TicketsSource Code
  • PlansMode.java
  • PlanningBoardDataService.java
  • Item.java
  • Config.java
  • PlanningBoardWidgetRenderer.java
Last modified on July 10, 2026