Remaining estimates spread evenly across start date/end date in Adv Roadmaps?

[Jennifer Mancke]

We are working to use Advanced Roadmaps for our teams capacity planning, but we have monthly allocated support hours spread across an annual (or multi-month) term that we have set up as projects in Jira.  The way I have seen Adv Roadmaps calculate available capacity is use up the teams capacity for the project ending soonest and pushing out the remaining estimate on all projects that end after, basically appearing that we have enough capacity until we look a year or so out at the latest ending project.  I was curious if anyone has found a way to have advanced roadmaps spread out the estimate evenly across the length of the project so we can understand what we need to delivery on on monthly support commitments.  TIA!

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Jennifer Mancke,

Advanced roadmaps (and roadmaps in general) is built around the principles of the iron triangle of planning, where you have a certain scope, one or more teams to deliver and your target dates over time.

Support work is not well suited to be managed through a roadmap, as it is unplanned work by nature. Incidents are unpredictable as to when they happen, they are usually solved rather than estimated and - as such - virtually unplannable.

And still, many organisations and teams are working in a hybrid mode, partially doing project work and partially delivering support. And that is often an interesting approach, though often the support workload puts a heavy strain on delivering new value.

It may be a good idea - if you don't do this already - to look at your team's capacity and divide it across project and support work. Remove the support work from your average team capacity. If - a totally random example - your team spends on average 40% of its time on support and 60% on projects, reduce your team capacity by 40% in the plan and only pull your project work in there - not the support.

Due to the unpredictable nature of support, this will obviously vary over time. But the better your high level metrics on this distribution of work, the more reliable your capacity / forecasting will become.

I know this is not a technical answer about the tools, but I still hope it helps you forward in your approach. 

[Jennifer Mancke]

Thanks Walter.  Yeah, we have already accommodated for the split between project and support work.