Customer story: how we do resource planning in Jira

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ere is a quick story from our users, an outsourced IT team working on a major fintech project, about the challenges of managing team capacity and the simple change that gave them a bird's-eye view of their entire workflow. Check it out!

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Why went wrong with Jira?

As a project manager in a team developing a mobile banking app for a major fintech client, my world revolves around Jira tickets, sprints, and backlogs. But for a long time, there was a wrench in workload visibility.

Jira fell short in giving us the bigger picture. Trying to figure out who was swamped and who had room for more felt like detective work. I would have to click through individual user profiles and piece together their assigned tasks, a time-consuming process that still didn't give me a clear, visual representation of our collective capacity.

The breaking point came during a critical pre-launch phase. Our lead backend developer, Alex, was completely overwhelmed. He was assigned to a mountain of high-priority tasks, but no one, including myself, had a clear visual on the sheer volume of his workload until he was already working late nights and weekends to keep up. It was a classic case of burnout waiting to happen, and I knew we needed a better way to manage our most valuable asset: our people.

Why did you try Planyway?

That's when I started looking for a third-party app. We needed something that would seamlessly integrate with Jira and give us that bird's-eye view of our team's capacity. Our requirements were simple: we wanted to see who was working on what, who was overloaded, and who could take on more work, all in one place.

After some research, we found Planyway. The installation was surprisingly simple; it was a quick add-on to our Jira instance. Planyway’s timeline and workload views were exactly what we were missing.

What did you achieve?

Now, at a glance, I can see a clear visual representation of each team member's tasks spread out over time. It’s incredibly easy to spot potential bottlenecks and re-distribute tasks to ensure a balanced workload. I can drag and drop tasks between team members, instantly updating their workload and ensuring no one is left with an unmanageable pile of work.

What I particularly love is the recently released feature for customizable capacity. We have a few part-time members on our team, and being able to set their specific working hours has made our capacity planning incredibly accurate.

Planyway has transformed how we manage our workload. We’re still a team that lives in Jira, but now with Planyway, we’re working smarter.