Resource Planning in Jira: Plan Capacity and Skills Before Work Starts

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While Jira is excellent for execution, it lacks native capabilities for forecasting future demand, planning by skills, and comparing upcoming work against real capacity. Without dedicated tooling, most Jira teams rely on assumptions or last-minute assignments based on availability rather than skills. This can lead to overloaded teams, skill mismatches, and missed delivery expectations.

What Is Resource Planning in Jira?

Resource planning in Jira is the practice of forecasting future work and aligning it with available people, roles, and skills before execution begins. Resource planning allows program managers to account for future demand and make optimal use of available talent.

How to Create Resource Requests in Jira

Native Jira, especially the standard plan, does not include a mechanism for creating resource requests. Even the Premium and Enterprise versions of Jira only allow you to plan capacity at the team level. Enter Portfolio by HeroCoders. The Advanced Edition of Portfolio allows you to plan the timeframe of future work, search for users with the appropriate role or skills, and – when you’re ready – assign the work items to them. This approach makes future demand visible while still remaining agile.

How Resource Requests Improve Resource Planning in Jira

Plan Resource Demand Before Execution

With Resource Requests, teams can model upcoming work even when ownership is not yet decided. This allows portfolio managers to understand how much capacity will be needed in upcoming months and which roles or skills will be critical. Resource planning in Jira becomes a forward-looking activity rather than a reaction when work is already underway.

Identify Resource Gaps Early

Creating resource requests reveals needed roles and skills in advance, making upcoming shortages or overloads visible early. This gives managers the opportunity to adjust timelines, train staff or secure new capacity before delivery is impacted.

Plan by Skills and Roles, Not Just People

Jira assignments are user-based, but real resource planning depends on skills. Portfolio allows you to associate roles and skills with your users, then search for someone with the right skills when you create a resource request. This ensures that when the request is fulfilled, the assigned person is not just available, but qualified.

Align Resource Planning with Portfolio Priorities

Resource Requests are part of Portfolio, a full-featured, Jira planning app that includes:

• Table, graph, treemap, pie chart and Gantt views

• Capacity planning

• Dependency tracking

• Capacity alerts

• Delivery alerts

These features make it possible for program managers to track initiatives, epics, and dependencies across multiple projects, see the big picture, and report to high-level stakeholders. The addition of Resource Requests ensures balanced work assignments and makes planning for future demand in Jira a strategic input, not an operational afterthought.

Integrated Resource Planning in Jira

Portfolio’s Resource Requests transform Jira into a proactive resource planning system. By capturing demand early, planning by skills, and integrating directly with the capacity planner, Portfolio by HeroCoders provides the structure and visibility needed to scale planning with confidence.

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I am with the HeroCoders team and this article was written with the assistance of AI. Please contact our team if you’d like to see a demo of what Portfolio can do.