Jira Capacity Planner: Ultimate Guide to Capacity Planning, Top Tools & Third-Party Apps

As a Program, Portfolio, or Product Manager juggling multiple initiatives—each with its own projects and epics—can feel like spinning plates. Visualizing and managing dependencies across teams is challenging, and without a robust Jira capacity planner, it’s all too easy to overload your people. You need a way to visualize teams' current workload, and be able to take on new tasks and projects with confidence that  the assignees' have the bandwidth to carry out the work.

This article will provide an overview of what a capacity planner is, what capacity planning features are natively available in Jira, and what Jira capacity planner options you can find in the Atlassian Marketplace.

What Is Capacity Planning and Why Do I Need a Jira Capacity Planner?

Capacity planning is the art (and science) of determining how much work a team can realistically deliver in a given time frame. If your teams work in Jira, then a Jira capacity planner will help you walk the fine line between ensuring your teams are productively busy, but not overloaded.

Risks of Failed Capacity Planning

Lack of capacity planning can put projects, your organization’s talent, and even your bottom line at risk:

• Taking on more work than teams can handle leads to missed deadlines and/or lower quality work.
• “Great job” gets translated into “Here’s more work…,” leading to burnout.
• Dependencies slip through the cracks, leading to wasted time and missed deliverables.
• Program leads are hesitant to take on new projects, unsure of who has the capacity to take on the task.

Advantages of Capacity Planning

Alternatively, with the right Jira capacity planner, you can:

• Instantly identify teams and individuals who have the capacity to take on new work.
• Protect your teams from overwork and burnout
• Easily see dependencies within your Jira hierarchy so that the most crucial work items get prioritized.
• Be able to confidently accept and assign new work.

Jira’s Native Options for Capacity Planning

Atlassian provides a few tools for capacity planning, depending on your subscription level:

The Confluence Capacity Planning Template

Atlassian offers a Capacity Planning Template in Confluence, with instructions for using it in the Atlassian Team Playbook. In this play, team members, grouped by role, estimate how they spend their time in a given week and the results are used to identify opportunities for taking on new work. The main limitation of this approach is that it relies on each person’s perception of how they spend their time  - which may or may not be accurate.You may want to consider using actual time tracking data to generate capacity planning report.

The Jira Workload Report

Jira provides a user workload report to see how a given user’s time is spent (their currently assigned work items and time on each). However, the report only loads for one user at a time. Aggregating the data to get the big picture of how all of your teams' time is spent would cost a significant time investment in itself.

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Jira Advanced Roadmaps (Previously “Portfolio for Jira”)

If you have a Premium or Enterprise Jira subscription, Advanced Roadmaps (also known as “Plans”) offers capacity and dependency tracking at a high level. Jira Advanced Roadmaps pulls data from multiple Jira projects, boards, and filters (depending on how the plan is configured) into a Gantt-style interface that shows team timelines, allocations, and dependencies.

The main drawback is that a Premium subscription costs roughly twice the price of Jira Standard – putting Jira Advanced Roadmaps out of reach for many small to mid-sized organizations.

Third-Party Jira Capacity Planner Apps

Luckily, there’s an array of Jira capacity planning apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace. Below is a curated list of some of the most popular Jira capacity planners.
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Choosing the Best Jira Capacity Planner Solution for Your Team

So what should you consider when choosing a Jira capacity planner?

First take a look at your Jira subscription. If you\re already on Premium or Enterprise, then it’s probably worth investing the time to learn to use Jira Plans (Advanced Roadmaps).

Organization with a Standard Jira subscription can benefit from using one of the highly functional, but lightweight apps from the Atlassian Marketplace. Look for a solution that makes it easy to visualize team member’s availability,  that warns you when someone is overbooked and lets you schedule previously unplanned work with a couple of clicks.

Now is the time to get ahead of overcommitment and empower your teams to work at peak productivity by incorporating capacity planning into your work in Jira. For more information, please check out the newly released capacity planner in Portfolio by HeroCoders.

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