As a Program (or Portfolio, or Product) Manager, do you struggle to track multiple initiatives, each with their own projects, and epics? Are dependencies and interdependencies difficult to visualize and manage? Is it a challenge to see the big picture and to share it with other stakeholders? Are you confident that your teams' actual capacity is taken into account in the organization’s strategic planning? How can you meet your deliverables while still protecting your teams from burnout?
How Do You Do Capacity Planning in Jira
Imagine instead, being able to see your teams' availability at a glance; being able to ensure maximum productivity without putting deliverables (or team member’s sanity) at risk.
Having faced those challenges ourselves is what inspired us to create Portfolio, the new Jira project portfolio management (PPM) app with a built in capacity planner.
But Wait - Doesn’t Jira Have a Capacity Planner ?
Atlassian provides several useful tools for capacity planning depending on your subscription level:
The Confluence Capacity Planning Template
There is a Capacity Planning Template in Confluence and instructions for using it in the Atlassian Team Playbook. The main limitation is that templated relies on team member’s perceptions of how their time is spent, rather than actual worklog data.
The Jira Workload Report
Jira provides a user workload report (Reports > User Workload Report) to see how a given user’s time is spent. The report shows their currently assigned work items, and the number of hours. However, the Jira Workload Report only loads for one user at a time, making it difficult to assess capacity across the entire team (or multiple teams).
Jira Advanced Planning
The Premium and Enterprise versions of Jira have “Plans” which allow for tracking, including capacity and dependency management, at a higher level. Plans can pull data from Jira boards, projects, and filters, and has a customizable interface. The limitation here is cost. Premium subscriptions cost approximately double what you pay for Jira Standard - putting this solution out of reach for many organizations.
If you’re looking for an easy-to-use, economical solution that will give you a 360º view into all of your Jira projects, and allow you to easily see and adjust team members' workloads, help has arrived. Portfolio by HeroCoders includes a built-in capacity planner to help you view booked work, assign previously unplanned work, and instantly spot when someone is overbooked so you can make adjustments.
How Does the Portfolio by HeroCoders Capacity Planner Work?
Portfolio by HeroCoders' capacity planner lets you define working hours and days, as well as holidays for your organization so capacity is always calculated based on an accurate base.
Setting the Scope of the Capacity Planner
When you create a new Planner, you can select which users' and/or groups' capacity you want to track. This flexibility allows program managers to track teams separately, or together - making it easy to see who is available to spend time on another project.
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View Booked Work in the Capacity Planner
Portfolio’s Capacity Planner makes it easy to see your team’s booked work. Color-coding allows you to see at a glance if a team member is overbooked, or has the capacity to take on new work. Portfolio will also issue a warning when work items are assigned to a team member who is already fully/over-booked.
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Adjust the Estimated Time of a Work Item
Of course, part of determining a team’s capacity is estimating how long a given work item will take. Sadly, our estimates are not always perfect (see this article for tips on making better estimations in Jira). With Portfolio by HeroCoders you can simply drag to adjust a booking date when the estimated time of a Jira work item changes.
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Or double click to open a popup that will allow you to input more detail:
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Assign Work Items via the Capacity Planner
When the Capacity Planner indicates that a team member is available to take more work, you can simply select from the Unplanned work items and drag it to the appropriate team member, making it easy to ensure that your team is working at max productivity.
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If you’re trying to optimize productivity across multiple projects, then the Capacity Planner in Portfolio by HeroCoders might just be exactly what you’re looking for. Now, when new projects are proposed you’ll know exactly what your teams are capable of and who specifically has the bandwidth to join the new initiative. Get the guesswork out of project planning and take charge of your portfolio today.
