Working with Multiple Teams? Here's How to Combine Cross-Team Velocity and Cross-Team Capacity

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Managing multiple agile teams in Jira presents a significant challenge for delivery managers and product owners. While Jira excels at tracking individual team progress, gaining a holistic view of a cross-team delivery’s true delivery potential requires more than just summing up individual team metrics. It's not enough to measure only cross-team velocity; a crucial piece of the puzzle lies in understanding cross-team capacity.

Cross-team velocity metrics are essential for understanding how much work your Scrum teams deliver and how reliably they meet their commitments. These metrics highlight delivery trends, changes in scope, and team reliability over time. However, even the most accurate velocity metrics don’t tell the whole story. Without understanding capacity - how much work your teams are actually able to take on, given their availability - you risk planning based on optimistic assumptions. Velocity shows delivery performance; capacity explains delivery potential. 

By combining commitment data with capacity awareness, teams can get a clearer picture of their actual delivery potential - and make better decisions, grounded in both effort and ability.

What are cross-team Velocity metrics, and why do they matter

Cross-team velocity metrics help you evaluate how much work each team delivers and how consistently and predictably they deliver across multiple teams. These metrics provide a shared frame of reference to compare delivery stability, planning accuracy, and scope control at the team-of-teams level.

One of the most useful metrics for this is the Say-do ratio - the percentage of work that was planned (“say”) versus what was actually completed (“do”). It gives immediate visibility into overcommitment, scope creep, or unplanned work across teams. To calculate it accurately, you need supporting metrics like Initial commitment, Final commitment, Total scope change, and Completed work (initial).

When used across teams, these metrics enable pattern detection, helping you spot which teams are underestimating, facing constant re-scoping, or consistently delivering. Say-do ratios below 100% don't always mean failure, but at a cross-team level, they may signal coordination or planning issues.

In the Broken Build’s Agile Velocity Chart Gadget, you can generate cross-team Say-do ratio charts by combining 4 key metrics and a target line across multiple Scrum teams. You can also build velocity comparisons using any of the 10 available metrics to get a full picture of your delivery dynamics at scale.

This flexibility makes it easier to track and improve delivery performance across teams, spot alignment gaps, and support data-driven coordination at scale.

What is cross-team capacity and why it’s different

While velocity tells you what teams have delivered, capacity tells you what teams can deliver. ActivityTimeline provides a bird's-eye view of available time across teams, offering a crucial distinction between theoretical throughput and real capacity.

Capacity considers the actual availability of team members. Factors like holidays, vacations, training, and even unplanned absences directly impact the hours available for work. A team might have a theoretical capacity based on full-time equivalents, but their real capacity for a given sprint could be significantly lower due to these real-world constraints.

ActivityTimeline allows you to visualize this availability, showing how many hours or days individual team members are allocated to tasks versus their total available time. This granular insight reveals potential bottlenecks and ensures that plans are grounded in the actual human availability of the teams. 

Team Utilization Forecast provides a high-level summary of projected team utilization (work allocated vs. total available time). This helps you spot if teams are overloaded or have room for more work.

Real use case: Stable velocity builds confidence, capacity grounds it

Imagine you’re managing a program with 4 teams working from a shared backlog. Your recent delivery data shows a stable cross-team Say-do ratio, indicating consistent performance across teams and sprints.

That kind of stability gives you something essential - the ability to forecast future delivery with high confidence at the cross-team level, assuming team structures and conditions remain consistent.

Using this historical velocity, you calculate that the teams will finish the current backlog in 6 sprints. That forecast is built on a steady focus factor - the ratio of delivered work to actual available capacity.

✅ Focus factor = average velocity ÷ actual team capacity

But here's the hidden risk: 2 of your 4 teams are going on vacation next sprint - and their capacity hasn’t been updated in your planning data. The forecast still says “6 sprints”, but that’s based on outdated availability.

👉 So what happens?

• Velocity says: “You’ll finish in 6 sprints.”
• Focus factor confirms that - only if capacity stays consistent.
• Capacity (if updated) says: “Not with half your teams unavailable.”

✅ Takeaway: When cross-team velocity is stable and capacity is accurate, you can forecast future delivery with high confidence, even in a multi-team environment.

How to set up a combined view in Jira

Getting a clear view of your agile program's velocity and capacity in Jira is key for making smart decisions. Here's how to build a powerful dashboard that brings it all together:

1. Start with a dedicated program dashboard

First, create a new dashboard in Jira just for your program or Agile Release Train. This keeps things clear and focused on overall delivery goals, away from individual team details. Name it something descriptive, like "Program X Delivery Overview," and share it with everyone who needs to see it.

2. Track past performance with Velocity charts

To get started, make sure the Agile Velocity Chart Gadget app is installed from the Atlassian Marketplace. Then, navigate to your Jira Dashboard and use the gadget search to find “cross-team velocity” and choose for the Scrum board. Once added, you’ll be able to visualize team delivery performance right on your Jira dashboard:

When setting up a cross-team velocity chart for Scrum or Kanban boards, start by selecting the boards you want to include. Then choose your estimation field (e.g., story points or issue count), define how many past time intervals to analyze, and optionally update the chart title for clarity. This helps ensure your chart reflects the right context from the very beginning.

Next, configure which metrics you want to visualize:

For each metric, you can also toggle whether to display its average line for better trend visibility over time.

To dive deeper into performance analysis, enable breakdowns by board, issue type, or other relevant categories, helping you compare teams, work types, or initiatives side by side.

3. Confirm future potential with Capacity visualizations 

Now, add ActivityTimeline's capacity gadgets to see what your teams can deliver. These tools show you the real human availability across your teams. 

Consider these ActivityTimeline gadgets:

• ActivityTimeline Chart. See detailed availability for team members, including vacations, holidays, training, and task allocations. The chart displays team capacity and utilization, compares planned vs actual. This highlights when capacity is low, helping you adjust plans early. 
• ActivityTimeline Report. This isn't a calendar, but it shows assigned work by person and sprint, confirming if teams are already packed for upcoming sprints. It shows the workload, capacity, availability and worklogs of teams and people.

When configuring these, select the relevant teams or user groups for your program. You can organize the data by teams, specific initiatives, or timeframes for flexible viewing. If an ActivityTimeline report or chart is added as a gadget in the Jira Dashboard, users can click on the link icon and embed it into a Confluence page if needed.

Cross-team Velocity metrics and Capacity: Why you need both

Used together, cross-team velocity metrics and capacity offer a complete picture of your delivery landscape.

Velocity metrics show what has been delivered and how consistently, while capacity metrics reveal what’s realistically possible based on real team availability.

When your cross-team velocity is stable and your capacity data is up to date, you can calculate a reliable focus factor, turning historical delivery into confident, forward-looking forecasts.

In other words, stable velocity allows you to forecast future delivery with high confidence, and capacity grounds those forecasts in reality, helping you plan realistically and adapt faster when things shift.

Try Agile Velocity Chart Gadget for free during a 30-day trial period

Try ActivityTimeline for Jira for free during a 30-day trial period

This article is a joint effort between Reliex and Broken Build – we are happy to share our combined knowledge with you.