What is Jira's team paradigm for capacity allocation?

[Adam Bang]

I'm looking at working with Jira for planning across multiple projects that may run simultaneously and testing Advanced Planning. Individual capacity planning was removed from Jira Roadmap and capacity moved to the team level.

What does Jira mean by team?

1. An employee is assigned to one team (Dev team) and that team works on multiple projects
2. Teams are by specific function (Frontend, Backend...) and an employee can be a member of multiple teams based on skill set.
3. Teams are for specific projects and a Dev can be on multiple projects.

From the developers perspective a dashboard would be setup to show their across projects, but from the planner's perspective, how is Jira designed to allocate work?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Adam Bang,

A team is what you consider to be the group of resources that works together to complete the work that is most commonly put together on a board. If your team is a scrum team, it is the group of people that is collaborating on a sprint.

In plans you can create one/more team on the Teams tab in your plan or add already existing teams (these are the same teams you can now manage from the Teams menu across the Atlassian platform. When you do, you can specify the team capacity there as well and link the team to its source of work. When this source is a scrum board, Plans can derive the team capacity from the team's historical performance (velocity).

Scrum (and the tooling too) works best if you have stable teams, as that helps to build reliable practices and a predictable speed of delivery. Making them cross-functional also helps to deliver features / value end to end as it reduces dependencies. But those are rather organizational challenges then tooling specific things.

Hope this helps!

[Adam Bang]

Thanks that helps with what teams are.

I read your answer as being option 3, every board has a shared goal and therefore a single team. Devs can be on multiple teams simultaneously.

For someone on multiple teams, is there a way to ensure their individual allotment is not over their capacity (weekly work hours)?

For example 3 developers on 2 teams with 80 hours per developer per week is 240 hours for both teams. Once number of teams and being on multiple teams it can hard to keep track of how much capacity is available.

(I meant 40 hours per week, but wrote 80)

[Walter Buggenhout]

It is indeed quite common that developers are on multiple projects simultaneously, but preferably not (consistently) on multiple teams.

While 80 hours per week seems like quite a heavy schedule (that's like 16 hours per day), I get your point. Yes, it can be difficult to manage the scenario you describe. That is exactly why Atlassian abandoned individual capacity and switched to team level capacity instead.

Suppose that your team consists of 4 developers. 3 of them work full-time on the team and one (on average) 50%. Lets assume that a normal full time developer works 40 hours per week; that would make your team's capacity 40 x 3.5 or 140 hours in a week; 280 hours for a 2 week sprint.

If you check in with your team if they have a planned vacation or if there is anything out of the ordinary with your shared developer, you can simply adjust at high level. The only goal of capacity is to try and make a realistic commitment for your next sprint's scope (short term) and a high-level estimation of when you will be able to deliver on your bigger deadlines (medium term). For the latter, having exact capacity numbers are usually not necessary. E.g. if you know that during the holiday season your team will work at approximately 50% of its normal capacity, that in itself is enough information to plan for the delivery of 50% of your normal scope too. 

[Adam Bang]

@Walter BuggenhoutThanks for your answers.

Related to defining the team paradigm you describe "work that is most commonly put together on a board" I asked a follow up How to automate adding team members to a Jira board?