Capacity Planning / Forecast based on skills needed, not individuals or teams

[Dr. Anja Wolter]

Hello everybody,

I am looking for some help.

We want to do our IT portfolio project planning based on skills needed for the projects, not on the individuals (users) or teams available.

We have multiple projects running and a lot of projects on the roadmap, which have not started.

For the running projects we know which skills we need in detail and have already assigned developers to tasks for the next 1-2 months based on their skills, but not for the complete project duration, so tasks which are more than 2 months in the future are usually unassigned.

For planned projects, we only know to which extend we need certain skills, (what, when and for how long (workload)), but have not allocated developers to the tasks.

We are looking for a solution, where we can enter the capacity/workload of the developers per week and their available skills.
Each developer has usually more than one skill and we want to be able to allocate the skills to the available capacity.

For example, Developer A has the skills Python and C++ and we want to allocate 30% of his capacity to Python and 70% to C++. We do not want the skills to be evenly allocated (50/50).

We want to know through the capacity planning, which skills are needed for the future projects, where we have enough capacity and where we lack capacity and maybe need to hire another developer for a specific project or move the start of a project.

So it should also be possible to create "placeholder" developers for yet unknown developers which do not have a Jira user yet.

Unfortunately neither Jira Plans, nor BigPicture or Tempo Planner are able to allocate a specific workload to a specific skill per developer.

Does anybody know a way to meet this requirement?

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Dr_ Anja Wolter , thanks for your question.

I seem to remember that there was some possibility to have generic resources in BigPicture Enterprise. If I were you, I would open a ticket to the vendor and just paste this question to them  - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1215158/bigpicture-enterprise?hosting=cloud&tab=support 

You could do the same with Tempo and just say, hey, I have this use case, what can you do for me? As you conclude, I don't know that there is a tool that aligns perfectly with what you want to do but a lot of these vendors have Solution Engineers / Technical Pre-Sales Specialists who should be able to help or brainstorm with you a bit.

Best of luck to you in your search!

[Dr. Anja Wolter]

Hello Valerie,

thanks for your answer.

We already use BigPicture and it is not possible to allocate workload percentages to separate skills.

And I had a demo with Tempo, showing, that it is not possible with Tempo either, because their focus is on teams not individuals.

Best regards,
Anja