Capacity planner for distributed teams?

[Alice Blaese]

Hi everyone,

I was wondering how you guys handle time zones and part-time work?

The thing is that our team is fully distributed. Some team members work in the EST zone, and some work in the GMT zone. We also have part-time contractors. Also, naturally, people have different holidays and PTO.

Ideally, we need a workload/capacity tool that lets us:

- Set working hours per person (e.g., 6h/day, 8h/day, etc.)
- Account for time zone differences when planning meetings/overlap
- Handle part-time allocation across projects
- See real capacity versus just a default 8-hour day

Every tool I've tried assumes everyone works 8 hours a day.

Thanks a lot

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi Alice,

This is a common challenge with distributed teams. 

For workload planning, it helps to separate working hours/availability from just counting assigned issues. A few things you’ll want to look for:

• Individual working schedules (for example, someone working 6h/day instead of 8h)
• Different capacity settings per person
• Holidays, vacations, and days off included in availability calculations
• Visibility into each person’s actual workload across projects

Planyway can help with this kind of capacity planning in Jira. You can set different working hours for each team member, configure holiday schemes, add vacations/time off, and see workload recalculated based on actual availability rather than a default 8-hour assumption.

For distributed teams, it also helps because you can see everyone’s allocation across projects in one place — who has capacity, who is overloaded, and where part-time contributors are already committed.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Best,
Mary from Planyway.

[Daria Spizheva_Reliex_]

Hi everyone,

Great question — this is actually one of the most common pain points we hear from distributed teams, so happy to share how ActivityTimeline handles it (I'm on the AT team).

A few things that should cover what you're looking for:

Working hours per person
You're not locked into a global 8h/day default. Involvement (how much time someone's available) can be set globally, individually per user, or even customized per day of the week — so a contractor working 6h/day and a full-timer working 8h/day both show accurate capacity.

Different schedules across time zones
If you have groups of people on the same schedule (e.g., everyone in EST vs. everyone in GMT), you can create a Workload Scheme and bulk-assign it to a Jira group in one go, rather than configuring each person individually. AT is also built to calculate correctly regardless of where your Jira instance or your users are located, with additional timezone shift settings if you need finer control for meeting/overlap planning.

Part-time & multi-project allocation
Since capacity is calculated per person based on their actual involvement (hours available minus time off), you can assign someone across several projects and immediately see if they're over- or under-allocated based on their real hours — not a flat default.

PTO & holidays
Vacation, sick leave, and holidays are built-in event types that automatically reduce a person's available capacity on those days, so the workload indicator always reflects real, current capacity rather than a theoretical full day.

Setup mainly involves mapping your team into Jira groups by schedule/timezone once, and then it stays low-maintenance after that. If you want a hand configuring Workload Schemes for your specific EST/GMT split, feel free to reach out to support@reliex.com and we can walk you through it.

Hope this helps!

[Mehmet A _Bloompeak_]

Hi @Alice Blaese

Managing capacity for distributed teams is tricky—especially when team members span different time zones, observe local national holidays or have varying working hours and availability.

If you need a visual and user-centric capacity planning experience to handle these distributed teams, you can try Sprint Capacity Planner for Jira developed by our team.

This app supports distributed team workflows by offering:

• Team Time-Off Management: Easily configure non-working days or company holidays in global settings to automatically adjust team availability.
  
  

• Flexible Individual Capacity & Leaves: Set individual capacity and individual vacation days for each team member based on their location and schedule.
  
  
• Estimation Flexibility: Choose between Story Points or Remaining Estimate with custom point-to-hour conversion rules depending of your team's workflow
  
  

• Visual Drag-and-Drop Calendar: Easily drag work items across the Backlog, Active Sprint and Future Sprints. Place and reorder work items anywhere on the timeline calendar to define their precise execution sequence
  
  

• Capacity Indicators: Spot over-allocation instantly with color-coded capacity indicators (Green: Fully utilizing available capacity, Blue: Has remaining available capacity and Red: Over-allocated)
  
  

• Real-Time Sprint Progress: Monitor active sprint health with live On Track / Behind Plan status indicators and real-time Planned, Done and Target metrics.

For further details, you can have a look at Smart Capacity Planning and Real-Time Sprint Health in Jira article.

If you have any questions, feel free to schedule a call with us.

Hope this helps!

[Hempel]

Welcome to the community, @Alice Blaese !

For distributed teams specifically, Tempo Capacity Planner lets you set up multiple teams with their own linked projects. The Resource Planning view shows availability and planned hours across all of them, and if someone is shared across teams, you set their availability percentage per team — the Team Capacity Report then shows total commitment across all projects, so you can spot over-commitment before it becomes a problem.

Docs on this exact scenario: https://help.tempo.io/planner/latest/managing-shared-resources
Disclosure: I work for the team behind Tempo.

[Rahul_RVS]

Hi @Alice Blaese 

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. The capacity can be allocated partial as well for each project/sprint.

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 

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hey @Alice Blaese ,

Counter question: are you using (or planning to use) native stuff (e.g. Jira Plans), or are we talking about some Marketplace solutions? 

I can share some of our examples where we, for part-time work, use Tempo and workload schemes which are then assigned to each user. Some users use an 8-hour workday scheme while others use a part-time one. 👀

Similarly, I know BigPicture does support resource planning, and they also have the same/similar concept where you can configure workload (hours per day) for each user.

As for different time zones, I know Jira Ops does support on-call schedules, which are designed to support these things, but they are mainly used by support teams rather than Jira (software/business) itself. 
On that, are we talking about Jira or JSM capacity planning, or potentially both? 

Cheers,
Tobi