How to prevent overbooking of Shared Teams Members in Portfolio

Question

I have two projects.

I want to optimize scheduling of these projects.

Portfolio seems to be a solutions for this.

As both project needs hardware and software people, that have to work on both projects, I created two shared teams:

* Hardware (persons: HW1, HW2)
* Software (persons: SW1, SW2)

Now I create two plans:

Plan1 for project 1

Plan2 for project 2

I assign shared teams to both plans (as Kanban) and assign persons two tasks for both plans.

HW1 has to work on Plan1 and Plan2.

When I press calculate in Plan1 and Plan2 person HW1 is booked for both plans at the same time: overbooked to 200%!

Plan1 does not seem to know anything of Plan2, even though the persons are shared.

How to fix this situation.

1st try:

Have a Program, add the two plans: Plan1, Plan2. Press "calculate". Well, nothing seems to change.

How can I see the usage of persons in this Program?

2nd try:

Have a Plan with both Projects in it: Scheduling seems to work fine.

But is this the right Idea to a ÜberPlan, collecting all the projects that are there?

Rational:

Maybe I'm totally on the wrong track with shared teams. If I share teams, somehow Portfolio should know this.

Is my idea of a team wrong. Show I have a team1 (HW1, SW1) and team2 (HW2, SW2)?

What is meant with sharing in the term: Shared Team?

Person booking is not clear among plans.

Any help is welcome.

Earl McCutcheon · Answer

Hi Michael,

For your concern about the "boss viewers (with no right to press calculate)", you can set up these users with a 'Portfolio for Jira viewer' permission to restrict them to a read only membership to the plan, additional details on the portfolio plan permissions can be seen here:

* Permissions in Portfolio for Jira

Next for the questions on how to configure the teams, this one is going to come down to how you approach the work, but first check out the following documents and their related sub pages on teams and skills that come into play for a referance point:

* Teams
* Learn stages and skills

One Key takeaways here as that Availability is not shared between plans, so setting availability for a user on two plans to 40 hours a week makes them committed for 80 hours a week, make sure to adjust the availability for users in multiple plans to reflect estimated time for each independently.

Also Expium an Atlassian Expert partner company put together a "Jira Portfolio tips and tricks" guide that has some really good advice on configuring the layout particularly the section "Configuring Working Hours and Days" pertaining to the team availability:

It might be expected that each person on a team would contribute 8 hours a day, making this an easy setup. However this is rarely the actual case. Typically speaking, users have meetings, are pulled aside for small conversations, and will rarely put 8 full hours a day on a project as a result of this. I find that 6 hours per day is far more realistic and will provide managers better data.

You noted that you are a small organization ~25 employees, this could allow you to do a single team using skills to distinguish work items between the available members within the team which gives you less overhead of managing multiple teams but also makes it harder to expand as you grow, and there is less granularity between projects, but it really comes dow to how you want to plan out the work a lot of data in one big chunk, or broken out into different sections.

Personally I recommend multiple chunks of data, to have the ability for granulized outcomes in the plan, I answered another post related to this recently viewable HERE relating to one or multiple plans that i recommend checking out as well, in in tandem with multiple plan I would also recommend the multiple team layout as well, while it requires additional overhead in maintaining the values, it also gives you more accurate outputs over time being able to track the capacity and velocity of the team per plan.

Regards,
Earl

Michael Möllney_x0trrd · Answer

Hi Gabi,

thank for the clarifications.

I already had the feeling, that it might be difficult to "calculate" schedules for team members that are calculated in other plan already.

I really like the "calculate" algorithm.

Scheduling in the ÜberPlan with all projects in one plan gave some results that where understandable.

The different epics started at reasonable points in time.

I still have to find out, how some "boss" viewers might only look at the project, he is responsible for (with no right to press calculate). Maybe there could be something done with the filters?

What might be OK for me, would be that you somehow can book hours from teams for your plan. Then the other plans could only access remaining times. But this probably would only work for Kanban?

Maybe I add some ideas to the issue link that you gave me.

May I ask you, if the idea of building teams by grouping all people for hardware and all people for software in individual teams is OK?

As we are a rather small company (~25 workers) with very small overlapping capabilities it might even be strategic (or in the sense of Portfolio) to build one big shared team with all skills in this team?

More details on what a team means to Portfolio would be great.

Thanks, Michael

Gabriele Franck · Answer

Hi, Michael

Indeed, the Capacity in Portfolio is only based on the current plan, and does not consider capacity from other plans.

This is expected, for now, as we separated the capacity calculation strictly between the plans because it would introduce some really baffling behavior for the scheduling if other plan schedules - possibly changing at every point in time without further notice - influence the scheduling solution. There would just be no control of the availability of a shared resource within that plan.

So the main purpose of having shared teams is because of the possibility to set the team member availability only once, but has no impact on the capacity over the plans (each team capacity is calculated on one plan bases). The current concept of shared teams dates back to a time where we did not have scenarios(another feature of Portfolio), so sharing teams was mostly used for creating different plans for the same problem.

There is a feature request for this: Consider capacity for the shared team members based on all plans where this team is used.

If it is something that you would like to see implemented, please vote for it to get the developers attention and add yourself as a watcher to get any further updates on it.

Please also have a look at our Implementation of New Features Policy.

Does this clarify things for you? :)

Gabi