Capacity Planning & Domain Work - Ability to track effort in a specific quarter

Question

Hi Community,

Reaching out to see if anyone has any suggestions on this.

* We work on Initiatives as our main issue types for roadmap planning. More often than not, initiatives can span over multiple quarters
* Within the initiatives, we create domain work issue types as child issues for our respective engineering teams to provide their estimates on capacity.  Collectively, these estimates from all engineering teams are then collated as "total team sprints" for that initiative.
* We work off of a heatmap and this then spreads the total team sprint value across the roadmap quarters assigned for that initiative. Example: If you have an initiative with a total team sprint of 6, then if the initiative spans over 2 quarters, the capacity will show an equal spread of 3 for Q3, and 3 for Q4.
* Our challenge is, that our engineering teams want to have the power to track this at a more granular level - if their work is going to take up 5 of the 6 sprints in Q3, then they will only have 1 sprint of work to complete in Q4. But because the heatmap "spreads" the capacity estimates evenly across quarters, then the capacity for both quarters is wrong.

Also, some domain teams may complete their work in the first quarter, but again as the parent initiative has multiple quarters, then capacity is unnecessarily added to future quarters which they won't be doing any work in.

I've added a diagram for example, any suggestions would be much appreciated.

OM_nie8an · Answer

Hi Lisa,

Thank you for reaching out, apologies for the confusion, we do have an enterprise account also which is where this work is being done.

Here is a quick summary using example of “domain 3. Who are required to do some of the work for this overall initiative.

The initiative is going to span over Q3 and Q4.

Domain 3 will complete 5 or their 6 sprints of work in Q3 with the remaining work in 1 sprint during Q4.

We use a heatmap document extracted from Jira which recognises that the initiative  spans over 2 quarters and then “spreads” the capacity of 6 sprints out to 3 sprints per quarter, when in fact a large chunk of the work will be done in the first quarter.

Hope that makes sense!

Lisa Forstberg_o85gu4 · Answer

Hi @OM ,

Seems like you want to give the teams the ability to plan their work and have  a team specific capacity planning.

Are you on Jira Cloud Free you will not have the functionality to fully support your capacity planning in the tool. you have multiple teams that work towards a shared and common goedl.   I would suggest to explore the Jira Cloud Premium with the Plans functionality. There you create a team and can put in a Team capacity which come into play in Plans. Also Jira Cloud Premium allow to extend your issuetype hierarchy to establish your Initiative issuetype at the top and then break that down to team/domain work and plan that accordingly.

Alternatively extend with  different capacity planning addons you can find on the Atlassian Marketplace but I think you should find a lot useful functionality in Premium.

best regards

Lisa