Ajay Hinduja Geneva: What's the best way to manage sprint capacity across multiple Jira boards?

[Ajay Hinduja]

Hi everyone,

I’m Ajay Hinduja, a traveler and project lead working with distributed teams across different time zones.

We currently use multiple Jira boards for different squads, but we’re facing challenges when trying to plan and manage overall sprint capacity at a higher level. It’s hard to get a unified view of team availability, workload, and progress across all boards.

I’d love to hear how others are handling this:

• Do you use any specific tools, plugins, or dashboards to manage cross-board sprint capacity?

• How do you ensure accurate planning and avoid overloading teams?

Looking forward to your suggestions—thanks in advance!

Ajay Hinduja

[Dave]

Hey @Ajay Hinduja 

Although I work for Atlassian, this isn't an "official" answer - I just wanted to share one approach we'd used internally for a large cross-team project.

At Atlassian we obviously have access to the Premium features of Jira so we leaned into the Advanced Roadmaps / Jira Plans capability and created additional hierarchy levels that we built a plan from.

In order to facilitate the work we actually ended up working from a single company managed project with multiple boards. I'd actually written a couple of Forge applications that are available on the marketplace to help with this:

• Issue Status Helper
• Jira Board Buddy

I also set up automation rules to remind users to ensure that a parent issue was set and that all work "laddered up" to the overall issue for the project (4 levels above epic!) 

The Issue Status Helper ensured that dates were set on issues and would roll up the hierarchy to create a clear roadmap. We allowed teams to manage their own individual capacity but by encouraging teams to provisionally place work into future sprints we were able to easily identify when work was on or off track (which we achieved by through releases with fixed end dates for each phase of delivery).

Board Buddy meant that all work within the project was only assigned to teams working on the project and ensured that work didn't go missing. 

This approach worked well and we were able to leverage the plan view to quickly identify which teams were on or off track for delivery and help get them back on track.

More recently I've created another app Sprint Capacity Analysis which could even further help in this process by allowing those individual teams to better plan their future sprints and manage capacity.

This approach might not be a great fit for everyone, but I would say that it worked well for us on a project spanning many months with multiples phases of delivery and more than a dozen teams contributing to it.

I hope this is useful !

Kind regards,

Dave

[Joshua Brock]

Hello @Ajay Hinduja and welcome to the Community!

I'm passing along our own solution in this area, Agile Hive. It's available for both Cloud and DC versions of Jira, and follows the methodology and principles of the Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe®.

Capable of managing projects from the team level, up through Agile Release Train (ART), large solution, and even portfolio, it gives both individual users, teams, teams of teams, and managers over those entities with extensive reporting capabilities at all levels (burnup, business value, load vs. capacity, velocity, etc.). It is a tightly integrated plugin for Jira.

Our listing on the Atlassian Marketplace (link shared above) will give you a great overview of Agile Hive, plus we have an extensive library of videos on our YouTube channel. If you have additional questions or would like a demonstration of either version, please feel free to reach out and schedule a demo with us.

Best of luck in your search, and again, welcome!


Joshua
Content & Technical Writer
Agile Hive