Premium Plans Teams with shared members and capacity management

James Jefferson

I have been searching for an answer to the following resource and capacity management query I have. In Jira I have defined 2 teams: Dev and Test. I added one dev to the dev team and one tester to both the dev and the test team (this is all hypothetical). In plans I have a plan with 2 projects pulled in. One project has the dev team with 7.5d per week (using Kanban) and the other project has 2.5d per week capacity. 

I am viewing the capacity by teams in Plans so that I can see the capacity gauge for each team. What doesn't add up though is that I can assign two tasks in my dev project to my tester totalling 7.5d effort, and a task in my test project of 2.5d effort to my tester for the same week.

Logically this means my tester is delivering 10d of effort in 1 week. The capcity gauges show green. I am concerned that a PM will have more manual work to oversee team members that belong to more than 1 team as it is very easy to over-allocate work to them without any warning.

Has anyone faced this issue and tackled it with good practice without buying more apps?

Thanks

James

Walter Buggenhout

Hi @James Jefferson and welcome to the Community!

In your plan you assign a certain capacity to your team. Back in the days - when there was an odd animal out there that could still speak - Portfolio for Jira at some point had skills as an additional layer to manage capacity.

But, to make this work you had to not only assign your people to their skills, but also for each issue amount of work needed from each skill so you could match demand with capacity. This pretty soon proved to be quite cool as an idea, but in reality completely and utterly impossible to manage (unless organizations would hire 2 or 3 additional PM's just to update their Jira issues and people skills all the time). So this was soon after abandoned again.

Since capacity is managed at a team level (a team has a number of available hours in a week), you would probably better off defining your teams per type of resource (so a test and a dev team). That way you know the actual capacity of your team, no matter what project the work is coming from. So don't assign a user to multiple teams or - if you do - reduce the total capacity of teams accordingly.

Hope this helps!