Capacity planning across a project portfolio?

[Goran Stoyan]

Hello everyone,

We’re starting to use Jira Premium Cloud Plans (advanced roadmaps) for roadmap planning across multiple teams, but we’re still figuring out the best way to model team capacity.

The idea is to use Plans to prioritize epics, schedule upcoming work, and understand how much roadmap work each team can realistically deliver.

However, our teams don’t spend 100% of their time on planned roadmap items, we usually reserve part of our capacity for bugs, support requests, and unexpected work.

The challenge is that this type of work is difficult to predict in advance. If we leave it out of the plan, Jira assumes teams have full availability for roadmap work, which makes future timelines and delivery forecasts less realistic.

What is the recommended approach for representing this reserved capacity in Jira Plans? Should we reduce team availability, create placeholder issues for maintenance work, or manage support capacity separately?

How do other teams handle capacity planning in Jira when they need to account for both roadmap delivery and ongoing operational work?

Thank you all in advance

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi Goran,

I think your concern is valid, and I wouldn't separate bugs/support work from your team's normal Jira workflow just to make the roadmap planning work.

The issue is that Plans assumes the capacity you give it is available for the work included in the plan. Since you already know that around 20% of the team's time will go toward operational work, I would account for that at the planning level rather than trying to add placeholder bugs months in advance.

One way to handle this is to

- set the team's capacity in Plans based on the time they actually have available for roadmap work (for example, 80% capacity),

- then create separate filters for the boards connected to your Plan that exclude operational issues such as bugs,

- and use those filtered boards as the sources for your Plan.

The filtered boards don't need to become your team's 'real' boards. They are simply a cleaner input for roadmap planning.

If you're open to trying marketplace apps, you can install Planyway, which is our cross-team planning app. 

Planyway lets you set custom working hours per day, either for the whole team or for individual members. By reducing the default working hours (e.g., from 8 hours to 6 hours per day), you can reserve 25% of the team's capacity for unplanned work, bugs, and support.

You can also mark unavailable days for vacations, sick leave, or recurring reserved time for support and maintenance, and Planyway will automatically exclude them from available capacity calculations.

Also, unlike Jira Plans, which focuses on team-level planning, Planyway allows you to track capacity at the individual level across projects, plus see a visual "heat map" of your team's capacity. You can easily visualize incidents, support tickets, and maintenance tasks alongside roadmap epics on a single timeline to have the most complete picture of where your team's time is actually going.

Hope this helps!

Happy to share more details about how Planyway handles this setup if it’s useful, and I’d be interested to hear what approach ends up working best for your teams.

Best,
Mary from Planyway.