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title: "Category Direction - Planning Analytics"
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| Category | **Planning Analytics** |
| --- | --- |
| Stage | [Manage](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/#manage-stage) |
| Group | [Analytics](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/#analytics-group) |
| Maturity | [Minimal](/direction/maturity/) |
| Content Last Reviewed | `2020-02-12` |

### Introduction and how you can help
Thanks for visiting the direction page for Planning Analytics in GitLab. This page is being actively maintained by the Product Manager for the [Analytics group](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/categories/#access-group). If you'd like to contribute or provide feedback on our category direction, you can:

1. Comment and ask questions regarding this category vision by commenting in the [public epic for this category](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2645).
1. Find issues in this category accepting merge requests. 

### Overview

![Dev Overview](/images/direction/dev/vsm-framework.png)

The DevOps lifecycle begins with planning. An idea is generated by a contributor - be it a support specialist, product manager, or community member - and is scheduled for development alongside many other feature improvements and bug fixes. In context with value stream management, it's the top of our funnel for new initiatives to be developed and eventually see their way to production. As organizations scale and resource management becomes more valuable - and more challenging, with hundreds or thousands of contributors - a strong need quickly emerges to optimize project management and find bottlenecks.

Planning Analytics seeks to deep-dive into the Plan stage of the DevOps lifecycle, by providing insight into your instance's planning activity. 

### Where we are Headed

While the Analytics group as a whole is more focused on iterating on [Value Stream Management](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/manage/value_stream_management/) and [DevOps Reports](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/manage/devops_reports/), our next step is to build a clear connection between the Issue and Plan stages of [Value Stream Analytics](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/analytics/value_stream_analytics.html#how-the-data-is-measured) and Planning Analytics.

### Target Audience and Experience
[Development Team Leads](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/roles-personas/#delaney-development-team-lead) and [Product Managers](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/roles-personas/#parker-product-manager).

### What's Next & Why
Our next step is also building out [project-level Issue Analytics](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/196561) by mirroring our existing group-level feature at the project level. We'd also like to make Issue Analytics [more interactive](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/196547) and allow users to click into the charts for further detail.

### Maturity Plan
This category is currently **Minimal**. The next step in our maturity plan is achieving a **Viable** state of maturity.
* You can read more about GitLab's [maturity framework here](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/maturity/), including an approximate timeline.

* You can track our journey toward this level of maturity in the [Viable maturity epic](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2646) for this category.