Pair field alternative for Plans

[Simona Spaccatrosi]

Hi All,

I'm working on a capacity plan in plans and wanted to add the field ''pair'' from epics to the plan view. Unfortunately when I looked for it it said the field is not supported and even checking with the Admin confirmed is not possible to add.

There is any other similar field I can use?

I want to display which members of my team are working on a certain project to make sure we can cover the upcoming scheduled work.

Please help me I've been running in cycles for the past 2 weeks.

[Mary from Planyway]

Hi @Simona Spaccatrosi 

You've hit on a known limitation: Jira Plans has specific restrictions on which custom field types it can recognize and display. Unfortunately, many custom field types, especially those not native to Jira's core (like some third-party app fields or very complex custom field configurations), are not supported in the Plan view for aggregation or capacity planning.

If your "pair" field is a custom field that simply isn't recognized by Plans, here are some alternative approaches within Jira that you might consider:

• If "pair" essentially means "which team members are assigned to this epic/project," you could create a "Team Members" custom field.
• While typically used for functional areas, if your "pairs" align with distinct components or sub-teams, you could leverage the Component field on Epics.
• You could use Labels on your Epics (e.g., pair-John, pair-Jane).

If you're continually battling with Jira's native capacity planning limitations and the inflexibility of custom fields in Plans, I highly recommend looking into a dedicated plugin that excels at visual resource and workload management.

You can definitely achieve robust, visual capacity planning, including understanding who is working on what, with the Planyway plugin for Jira.

Planyway integrates directly with your Jira projects and issues, transforming them into an interactive capacity timeline. It allows you to:

• Drag and drop Jira issues to plan their duration and assign them to specific team members.
• Planyway indicates team member's capacity, whether people are overloaded or not. 
• You can balance and calculate workload automatically.
• Holidays, vacations and days off are taken into account.
• Different scenarios for capacity calculation: based on estimation, remaining time, etc.
• Time tracking and reports are also supported in the same app.

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Simona Spaccatrosi 

Welcome to the community.

What type of field is "pair"?

[Simona Spaccatrosi]

Hi Marc,

is basically a field that allows you to ''pair'' multiple team members to a ticket (epic/story etc)

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Simona Spaccatrosi 

That's not the question, what type of custom field is this, single select, etc..?

[Simona Spaccatrosi]

It's multiple choice custom field, don't know if there is a limit I usually pick a maximum of 3/4 people. As it picks any user from the company I'd say there is an ID value in the backend.

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Simona Spaccatrosi 

These fields can be used, unless this is a created field in a team-managed project.

limitations-of-team-managed-projects-in-plans 

[Simona Spaccatrosi]

As I said in the first comment, it says this field is not supported.

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Simona Spaccatrosi 

I get this, but is the project you use a team-managed or company managed project and what exact type is the field.

Finds the field type via the Jira admin section work items, fields.

[Simona Spaccatrosi]

Hi Mark,

what the Jira manager has told me is the below:
”User Picker (multiple users)”

there is anything else that should be in the admin section? I have no access to it unfortunately

[Andrew Griggs]

Bonjour All,

The "Pair" field in question, is Atlassian's default, OOTB field "Pair" which is a "User Picker (multiple users)"
Seems Plans doesn't support this kind of field yet.

So my user (Simona) is trying to find a way of assigning multiple Assignees to an Epic (for software)/ Plan (for Plans) .. so that capacity looks correct on the timeline 

however, I'm trying to find a way to do this that doesn't involve creating multiple, role descriptive assignee fields.
i.e. Dev 1, Dev 2, QA 1 ..   which of course this is unscalable

Simona,
could you upload a screenshot of how it currently looks ..  and then describe the required look, based on the screenshot

[Simona Spaccatrosi]

So basically the main idea will be to have all the epics lined with their progress and have a clear idea of the team members working there to make sure the team doesn't get more work that it can actually handle.

As we have only one assignee per epic I wanted to add the Pair field to the plan, which looks like can add multiple users. Unfortunately this is not supported and me and Andrew have tried to find an alternative but without luck.

We won't be able to insert all the stories as the plan needs to be as clear as possible considering that senior members and stakeholders need an idea on what is going on so can't gave 300 tickets in there.

[Marc - Devoteam]

Hi @Andrew Griggs 

Welcome to the community.

Indeed User Picker, for multiple user fields are not supported in a Plan.

You could start using Teams, teams can contain multiple users and a Team can be set on an Epic.

Als see open feature request, JSWSERVER-25122 

[Simona Spaccatrosi]

Hi @Marc - Devoteam 

I've tried with Teams already but as some people work on more than a project can't be applied, and even if we create few teams (like QA. Dev etc)  it only allow me to assign a team only per project. So not useful for this.