How to do capacity planning in Jira using the premium Plan feature

[Michel]

I am currently using Jira Premium Cloud for a scrum project, where I've created six tasks, each aligned with a one-week sprint. All tasks are assigned to a single individual (myself) within one team. These tasks are estimated in both story points and hours, with the team's velocity is around 40 points and 56 hours. On average, each task has an original estimation of approximately 5 hours (~30 hours in total) and 5 story points (30 points in total).

My goal was to use the "plan" feature of my Jira Premium for ensuring effective "capacity planning." I anticipated that during the capacity planning process, Jira would alert me if a person was assigned tasks beyond their "capacity." However, contrary to my expectations, Jira allows me to assign all six tasks to a single person on the same day, even when the total estimated time exceeds 24 hours or the total assigned points. Furthermore, the auto-scheduler simply sets the start and end times for a week without issuing any warnings, even when the capacity is clearly exceeded.

How can I effectively conduct "capacity planning" if Jira does not provide warnings when capacity is exceeded? What am I doing wrong?

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Michel 

Welcome to the Atlassian community.

The Auto-schedule documentation does not indicate that it gives any consideration to the individual you have specified as the Assignee of an issue. 

All the documentation concerning capacity talks about Team capacity and Sprints, not individual assignees. I did see a statement under the Capacity section that says the auto-scheduler assumes a team member can work on only one item at a time. But it is ignoring the Assignee field. It is looking only at the number of Team members and the Team capacity. So in the Auto-scheduler's logic, those issues scheduled at the same time are assumed to be worked on by different team members without the scheduler identifying the specific team members.

Let us say your Team has a capacity of 56 hours in a sprint and has 3 members. That means each member can handle ~18 hours of work in a sprint. If each task is about 5 hours, then each user can handle 3 tasks in the sprint. The auto-scheduler will give each team member 3 tasks, disregarding how you might have set the Assignee field on those tasks.

As far as I can tell Jira Advanced Roadmaps Plans do not support capacity planning based on the individual capacity of individual Team members.

[Michel]

Thanks for your answer. In the scenario I provided, I'm not looking for "individual" capactiy planning. My team has just 1 member, so even if you consider entire team capacity, there is no way it should allow assigning 24 hours of work for 1 day for the entire team. Let's forget about the auto-scheduler, even if I want to assign, there is no way I can do proper capacity planning if it allows me to assign 6 tasks in parallel to a team of 1 member. It's not considering the "capacity" of the team at all! It's not the way it suppose to work.

[Trudy Claspill]

Eliminating the auto-scheduler function from the scenario, I did some more experimenting.

In my Team I have one member. I set the Team Settings thus:

I then created 3 tasks each with a duration of 16 hours (2 days).

I also set my global Time Tracking options to 8 working hours in a day and 5 working days in a week, though I don't know if that actually makes any difference in this scenario.

I then assigned all three tasks to a single sprint on the same two days, being worked on in parallel - 48 hours of work in a sprint where the team has only 40 hours of capacity.

In the timeline I saw the sprint turn red and a message when I hovered on it.

If I change my Team's capacity to 48 hours (in the Team Settings) then that red highlight goes away.

That seems to be the extent of the warnings - looking at the capacity for the Team for the Sprint, but not the scheduling of individual tasks in parallel.

I haven't found anything yet in the documents to indicate that AR Plans will warn about the amount of work scheduled for a single day when that scheduling is done manually.

It does look like there might be some additional information that could display if I had actually created a sprint in the underlying board. In my Plan the sprints are just a projection, not a reflection of future sprints in the Scrum board.

I confess that I don't work with AR Plans on a regular basis, so I'm just experimenting to see what happens and reviewing the documentation.

[Michel]

I see. Thanks for helping out and performing this experiment with me. I truly appreciate it. I learned that the red color of the scrum rectangle indicates if the sprint has more tasks than the capacity, but it doesn't take into account that the single member in the team can't handle all the tasks in parallel, it needs to do it one by one.

I don't think this is very useful, I was expecting proper planning and capacity consideration from Jira.

Once again, thanks for your help, I appreciate it.