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

Michel_o5a3ai

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 P 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.