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.

[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 

[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!

[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