One of the hardest parts of capacity planning is knowing when people aren’t available. Even if you know your teams’ working hours, holidays, and booking commitments, unplanned sick days, vacation requests, or ad-hoc time off can throw off your plans, leading to missed deadlines and late deliveries.
Wouldn’t it be great if your capacity planner knew when your team members were going to be away?
Portfolio by HeroCoders now lets you set and track team members’ time off (sick days and vacation days) directly inside Portfolio. Best of all, that time-off data is integrated into Portfolio’s Jira capacity planner, ensuring project managers always have up-to-date visibility into who is (or isn’t) available for work.
How Built-in Time-off Tracking Improves Your Planning
Most capacity planners rely on two data inputs:
- The base calendar (working days, hours per day, holidays).
- The booked assignments (in this case Jira work items) allocated to each team member.
But what about when someone is scheduled to be out (vacation, sick leave, or other personal time)? If that time off is managed outside of your Jira capacity planner (in spreadsheets, HR systems, or separate calendars), then you must manually adjust for it — a time consuming and error-prone process.
Tracking time off inside Portfolio allows project managers to:
- See true availability — The tool knows someone is out on a given day and will reduce their overall capacity accordingly.
- Prevent overbookings — Integrating sick or vacation days into your Jira capacity planner automatically ensures that team members won’t be counted on to work during time they’ve scheduled off.
- Have a single source of truth — Portfolio uses all aspects (working hours, holidays, time off, booking assignments) to determine a team member’s capacity, reducing misalignment, manual cross-checking and overbookings.
How to Set and Track Time Off in Portfolio
Portfolio by HeroCoders makes setting allowable days and tracking scheduled/taken PTO simple:
1. Assign holiday calendars
Portfolio lets you create multiple holiday calendars that can then be assigned to users – great for geographically distributed teams.
2. Define time-off allowances
Admins can define the number of allowable sick days and vacation days (globally and/or per user), making it easy to establish expectations and enforce policy limits.
3. Book time off (sick / vacation)
Team members can then schedule time off via the Portfolio Vacation setting.
That’s it! Portfolio’s capacity planner will automatically adjust, ensuring that holidays, vacation days, and sick days are always included when a user’s availability is calculated.
To get the most out of this feature, incorporate it into your teams' processes, making sure time off is logged in Portfolio. You may also want to review and adjust Jira work item estimations (which you can do from within Portfolio) when a user’s capacity changes.
Portfolio by HeroCoders provides a powerful solution to capacity planning in Jira, letting you visualize team workloads, detect overcommitment, and plan smarter across your portfolio with features like:
- Multiple-project portfolios
- Table, Gantt chart, graph, pie chart, and tree map viewing options
- Capacity alerts
- Delivery alerts
- Ability to add fields and/or new work items on the fly
- Bulk editing of Jira work items
- Color-coded capacity planner with drag and drop work item assignment
The addition of built-in time off (sick / vacation) tracking makes your Jira planning more accurate and reliable than ever before.
