Best App/Gadget to Determine Assignee workload Factoring in Estimated Time

[Nic H_]

I am trying to figure out a way to best understand how work is distributed across three team members so that when new tickets are created, the manager of the space knows who the best team member to assign it is. The app does not need to determine who is the best next assignee.

Ultimately, the stand-alone 'How many 'in progress', 'paused', and 'blocked' tickets per assignee falls short because one person with few tickets may have a longer Estimated Time to Complete than another assignee with many tickets that take little time to complete. Hence, something like a Gantt chart that takes each of the three assignee's ticket numbers and estimated time and plots them in the calendar format. Is there a built-in app? I tried 'Time Tracking Report', 'Issue Calendar Gadget' but obviously neither accomplish the previous requests.

I see some apps, Issue Calendar for Jira (perhaps), TeamTide – Capacity Planning for Jira (bad reviews; free so questionable), Activity Timeline: Resource Capacity Planning, Time Tracking (incurs extra pricing), but I'm hoping there is perhaps a gadget set-up that may work better than calendar in above picture that I maybe overlooked.

My superiors are also leaning against using Scrums/sprints. A calendar or Other graphical interface that can show the aforementioned data in a calendar format or another helpful graphical interface would be much appreciated. The tickets don't have due dates as each ticket is its own individual task and the effort to close can vary wildly.

[Alina Chyzh_Grandia Solutions]

This is a classic resource capacity planning challenge. When workload varies significantly by task complexity rather than ticket count, you need a view that factors in time estimates, not just issue counts. Native Jira doesn't offer a built-in capacity planning view that combines assignee workload with estimated time in a calendar or timeline format, which is why many teams turn to the Marketplace for this specific use case.

For your needs, I'd recommend checking out the Capacity report in Report Hub created by our team, which is specifically designed to help you visualize team member workloads based on time estimates and availability. You can explore this and other reporting features at https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1231654/report-hub-custom-charts-reports-timesheets-for-jira?hosting=cloud&tab=overview. Hope this helps

[Daria Spizheva_Reliex_]

Hi @Nic H_ , you’re absolutely right — just counting “In Progress” tickets doesn’t tell the full story. Three big tasks can be heavier than eight small ones.

What you’re really looking for is a capacity view over time per person, not just a status report.

Jira’s built-in gadgets won’t handle that well (especially without sprints or due dates). If you want a calendar/Gantt-style view based on estimates and real workload, you’ll need a resource planning app.

ActivityTimeline is probably the closest fit from what you mentioned. It shows workload vs. capacity per team member and makes overload visible at a glance — without requiring Scrum.

[Ariel Yadin]

@Nic H_, workload distribution visibility is a real pain, but I'd push you to ask a harder question first: are you distributing the right work, or just distributing work evenly?

A few things that helped my teams:

• Map tasks to strategic priorities before looking at who has capacity. If a task doesn't connect to a goal, it probably shouldn't be on anyone's plate.
• Capacity balance matters, but strategic alignment matters more. An evenly distributed team working on the wrong things is still a problem.
• Make OKRs visible at the task level, not just in quarterly reviews. When engineers can see why a ticket exists, prioritization conversations get a lot easier.

We actually built Bazz OKR partly because we kept seeing teams optimize for busyness instead of impact. Once OKR linkage is visible at the work level, the 'who should do this?' question almost answers itself.

What does your current process look like for deciding which work gets picked up first when capacity is tight?

[Nic H_]

Hi Ariel,

For your first and second point, tickets that aren't urgent are kept in the Manger Review column. Then when the high priority tickets are completed or sent to review, then the manager allocates the lower priority tickets.

>What does your current process look like
Higher priority tickets are worked on first, and lower priority tickets (if an assignee was already working on them) are transitioned to Paused under the reason 'Decreased Priority'. Which brings up a good point about if an APP can factor Priority as well as Estimated Time and Number of Tickets per assignee.

[Ariel Yadin]

That makes sense. sounds like you already have a solid prioritization flow in place.

The tricky part (and what I’ve seen break in similar setups) is that once you introduce: Priority, Estimated effort, and Work already in progress, you’re basically trying to solve a capacity planning problem, not just a visibility one.

The challenge is that Jira doesn’t really have a native concept of “available capacity over time per person”. Which is why simple views (tickets per assignee, calendar, etc.) fall short.

Even if you add: Estimated time and Priority weighting, You still don’t get a clear answer to:
“Who can realistically take this next without overloading or delaying other high-priority work?”

That’s where most teams either:

• Move to dedicated capacity-planning tools (such as Activity Timeline, Tempo Planner, etc.).
• Or simplify the model (e.g., limit WIP per person instead of trying to optimize perfectly)

One lightweight approach that sometimes works without extra apps:

• Define a rough “capacity budget” per person (e.g., hours per week)
• Use estimates to track how full that budget is
• Combine that with WIP limits to avoid overloading

Not perfect, but it’s usually more actionable than trying to infer capacity from ticket counts or calendar views.

Out of curiosity, are your estimates (time to complete) reasonably consistent across tickets, or do they vary a lot?

[Nic H_]

>Are your estimates (time to complete) reasonably consistent across tickets, or do they vary a lot.

Long answer short, we just started utilizing the Time Tracking and Original Estimate so those aren't accurate quite yet.

But even without time estimates, we know that Assignee #2 working on Product A can take anywhere from a day on FA_Example-244 to 4 days on FA_Example-273 because the nature of failure analysis is that different failures can manifest as the same symptom, and different root causes are possible. I've attempted process flow charts to help FA processes, but 

Long winded answer to say 'yes, they can vary a lot'

[Rahul_RVS]

Hi @Nic H_ 

Welcome to the community !!

For Jira cloud, If you would like to try a mktplace app for tracking resource workload and capacity planning across multiple projects/boards, take a look at

Capacity Planner 

The app offers:

1. Resource Tracking and Allocation : The app allows you to monitor and track various resources by adding them as part of a template, and their work allocation across multiple projects / sprints.

2. Real-time Visualization: Provides intuitive charts, graphs to visualize resource utilization and capacity levels in real-time.

3. Full Sprint / Project Fix version Capacity and Monitoring

Mode details here

Disclaimer : I am one of the app team member 

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Nic H_,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community,

It looks like you have already tried some of the native Jira gadgets, but they do not meet your needs in this case because they are based only on issue count. A possible solution would be to try an app from the Atlassian Marketplace.

If you are open to using an app, I would recommend a solution based on the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget offered by our Great Gadgets app.

Assuming that all the issues already assigned have an effort field set such as Remaining Estimate (or maybe Story Points), you can get a chart like that based on the total effort calculated as sum of Remaining Estimate (or Story Points), instead of just the count of tasks. 

For a chart like this, you have to configure the gadget like this:

With a gadget like this, a manager can quickly identify which person has the least work assigned. And you can configure it to calculate in days, giving you a clear view of how many days are assigned to each team member.

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at support@stonikbyte.com.

Danut.

[Nic H_]

Hi Danut,

Thanks for the reply. I see the last image and was wondering if colors are assignable to ticket priority.