Portfolio for JIRA - need to understand how overallocated is calculated

Timothy Martel

Hello,

We use JIRA to manage stories.  We use story points only (no time, no due dates, etc.).

We use Portfolio to manage our Teams.  Each team is shared and has individual members, with each team member having hours assigned.  I am careful to split hours for those members who belong to multiple teams.

I have configured Portfolio to integrate with my JIRA projects.  In some cases, Portfolio will show times where a certain person is over capacity.  But how?  I do not map story points to hours.

Does portfolio have a hard-coded "story point --> hours" mapping behind the scenes?  

I need to know this so that my higher level directors will have trust in the calculation.  

Thank you!

Tim M.

Earl McCutcheon

Hi Timothy,

This does not sound like the scenario you are running into but just to cover all the points portfolio does have a "story point" to "hours" mapping option available but it has to be set manually in the advanced settings of the issue sources, the option is to add in a conversion factor to line up X story points = Y hour as you described, but only if you have issue sources importing to a plan that is using points and the source is using hours or vice versa, but as you noted having the Projects and boards using Points this is probably not the case but I wanted to include the details on these settings incase anyone else runs into this post with a question on story point's mapping to hours, the details can be seen here:

• Defining an estimate method conversion factor

Where in your case, when using story points for the estimation statistic, the capacity is weighted based on the Teams Velocity.  Velocity is a summation of the teams points divided across the team and can be set manually to a fixed value or left default will calculate off the average of the total completed estimates over the last several sprints.

There is a really good breakdown of how the story points relate to hours and the differences in This Blog Post under the section "Story points vs. hours", an then Details on how the velocity is calculated in the documentation HERE, And then there is a good break down of the velocity relation to teams and team members capacity HERE.

Regards,
Earl