Capacity by team member?

[Grzegorz Kostecki]

Hi,

We’re currently trying to improve our sprint and roadmap planning process and get better visibility into how work is spread across the team.

One challenge we’re facing is understanding whether planned items are realistically distributed among individual contributors. We’d like to identify situations where someone may be overloaded or where capacity is not being used effectively before the work is committed.

Does Advanced Roadmaps have a built-in way to review workload at the assignee level using issue estimates?

Ideally, we’re looking for a view that shows how much estimated effort each person has planned over specific days or weeks.

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi Grzegorz,

Advanced Roadmaps does not currently support individual or per-user capacity planning. The feature was intentionally updated to focus solely on team-level and sprint-level capacity.

If you need to plan both at the individual and the team level, you can use Planyway alongside Jira.

Planyway's Workload view allows you to see each team member's assignments compared to their available capacity. Capacity is calculated based on each person's working hours and workload scheme, while also accounting for holidays, vacations, sick leave, PTO, and other days off (you can also set custom workload schemes). Overloaded people are easy to spot, and you can rebalance work on the spot by dragging tasks to another date, changing the assignee, or adjusting estimates.

If someone works across multiple Jira projects, Planyway combines all of their assignments into a single workload view, so you can see their actual capacity instead of checking each board separately.

Hope it helps.

Best,

Mary from Planyway.

[Danut M _StonikByte_]

Hi @Grzegorz Kostecki,

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

As Karl mentioned, Jira doesn't provide a built-in view of each person's capacity. For that, you'll most likely need an app from the Atlassian Marketplace.

If you're looking for a simple way to visualize each team member's workload (based on the sum of the estimates for their unfinished tasks), I'd recommend taking a look at the Pivot Table & Pivot Chart gadget included in our Great Gadgets app.

With this gadget you can easily generate a chart or table showing the workload of every person. 

This way you can easily visualize the work assigned and determine if it is balanced or not across team members.  

To get a view like this on your Jira dashboard, the gadget should be configured like this, with a filter/JQL that returns the unresolved work items. 

In this example the workload is calculated as the sum of Story Points, but you can also use other fields instead, such as Remaining Estimate or Original Estimate (in hours or days).

Hope this helps. Feel free to contact our team directly at support@stonikbyte.com if you need any assistance in configuring this gadget.

Danut.

[Svitlana Samotis _Reliex_]

Hi @Grzegorz Kostecki

In my experience, team-level capacity is only part of the picture. You can have enough capacity overall and still end up with an unrealistic plan because the work isn’t distributed evenly across the people with the right skills or responsibilities.

 That’s why I find individual-level capacity visibility particularly important.

We actually have a Jira app called ActivityTimeline that provides this layer on top of Jira. It takes planned issues and estimates and shows them on each contributor’s timeline, together with their capacity and time off. You can look at specific days or weeks and immediately see where someone is overbooked or where capacity is still available.

 

It makes the conversation during planning much more concrete because you’re not only asking whether the team has enough capacity overall, but whether the actual distribution of work makes sense.

[Rahul_RVS]

Hi @Grzegorz Kostecki 

Welcome to the community !!

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 

[Dave]

Hey @Grzegorz Kostecki 

It's not an official Atlassian product, but you might want to try the Sprint Capacity Analysis application that is available for free on the Atlassian Marketplace (see https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1238160/sprint-capacity-analysis ) 

This offers both individual capacity and team capacity planning as well as allowing you to set availability for individuals and teams and can be used effectively to achieve predictable delivery. It's used by a number of teams within Atlassian and I'd be grateful for any feedback on it (even if you don't decide to use it).

There are a bunch of other features in there as well (planning based on theme, automatic scheduling, etc)... it might be worth giving a go! Happy to answer any questions on it that you have.

Thanks,
Dave

[Karl from Ricksoft]

Hi @Grzegorz Kostecki ,

Native Jira doesn't have a true per-person capacity view , capacity in Plans (Advanced Roadmaps) is set at the team level (velocity for Scrum teams, weekly hours for Kanban), not per individual.

The workaround people actually use in practice: create a separate "team" in Plans for each individual (1-person teams), so each person gets their own capacity setting that can be tracked independently in the same plan. It's clunky since it means managing N teams instead of 1, but it's the standard approach until Atlassian ships native per-person capacity,  this has been a long-standing, frequently-requested gap in Advanced Roadmaps, so you're not missing a hidden setting.

If your team is small, honestly a lightweight spreadsheet alongside Jira might be less overhead than the 1-person-team workaround,  depends how much you value having it all in one tool vs. simplicity.

Based that from their docs: https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-cloud/docs/create-and-add-teams-in-advanced-roadmaps/

[Davit Mkrtchyan - Be On Time]

Hi Grzegorz @Grzegorz Kostecki  -

Mary @Mary from Planyway is right that Advanced Roadmaps dropped per-user capacity on purpose - it is
team and sprint level now, and it will not give you the assignee view you are
describing. Marketplace apps fill that gap, hers is one of a few.

I would add one thing that sits underneath the tool choice, because it decides
whether any workload view actually tells you the truth.

A per-person workload chart is only as honest as three inputs, and Jira does not
enforce any of them:

- coverage of estimates. The view sums estimates by assignee. Every unestimated
issue counts as zero load. So the person who never estimates looks the LEAST busy,
when they are often the most. Before trusting any chart, check what percentage of
planned issues actually carry an estimate
- available capacity, not nominal. "100% capacity" for most tools defaults to a
full working week. Meetings, PTO, support rotation and admin eat 30-50% of that.
If you compare planned effort against a flat 40 hours, everyone looks fine right up
until they are not. Whatever tool you pick, set real available hours per person, not
the default
- assignee at plan time. Workload by assignee only works if issues are assigned
while you are still planning. If your team assigns at sprint start, the pre-commit
view you want is mostly empty. Worth checking your workflow assigns early enough to
plan against

None of this is an argument for or against any specific app - it is what makes the
app's numbers trustworthy once you have one. If estimate coverage is low or capacity
is left at default, even a good workload view will confidently show you the wrong
picture.

Happy to go deeper on the estimate-coverage part if that is where you are.