Seeking Best Practices: Capacity & Time Tracking in a Cloud Environment

Question

We are currently evaluating options to optimize how we track and record work efforts in the future. As part of this, we are testing various scenarios and have already activated several apps for trial purposes.

One specific area where I would really appreciate recommendations or shared experiences from the community is how to handle capacity – more precisely, how to manage and reflect actual employee presence time.

Presence time data is recorded locally in a separate system, so data integration into Jira is required.

In the past (in our Server & DataCenter environment), we used a custom-built app that displayed the daily cumulative presence time of employees. It also provided a daily comparison between "presence hours" and "logged hours."

As we are now moving towards a cloud-based setup, we are looking to gather and assess experiences and suggestions for a future-proof solution.

I’m looking forward to your ideas, experiences, and feedback!

Daria Spizheva_Reliex_ · Answer

Hi @Daniele Tagliani

Since you're exploring options, let me introduce our app - ActivityTimeline - that might help with tracking employee presence and work efforts. It does offer some capabilities that could be useful for your situation.

The plugin allows you to set up personal capacities based on working hours and can automatically account for time away like vacations, holidays, and sick leaves. These absences show up visually on the timeline, which might help give you a clearer picture of actual availability.

For integrating with your existing presence data system, ActivityTimeline does have integration capabilities with external calendars (like Google or Outlook). Regarding work effort tracking, users can log time for tasks either directly in ActivityTimeline's modules or through Jira's standard time tracking. The system supports both single and multi-day entries.

For your "presence vs. logged hours" comparison needs, there are a couple of reports that might be helpful: the Planned vs Actual Report compares estimated time with actual time spent, and the Resource Utilization Forecast shows resource utilization against capacity to help identify if people are over- or under-loaded.

If you have any questions or concerns, reach out our success team. Hope this helps!

Gracjan Wesołowski _HeroCoders_ · Answer

Hi @Daniele Tagliani

Welcome to the community!

If you are interested in third-party addons, I can recommend our Portfolio app.

We have created this app specifically to easily monitor all projects, their statuses, and dependencies in a single view.

With built-in capacity planning, you can effectively allocate resources and ensure that projects stay aligned with business objectives:

The Advanced edition also includes Gantt chart planning in the Portfolio view.

Recently, we also released an option to allow your employees' holidays and sick days allowance.

If you are interested, you can book a demo here.

Best Regards.

Gracjan

Daniele Tagliani · Answer

@Rahul_RVS @Anastasiia Maliei SaaSJet Thank you for your suggestions :)

I noted in my request that the presence data is captured in a separate on-premises system, and it is essential to have a solution that supports automatic integration—such as a scheduled import or API interface—into Jira or a dedicated app.

Ideally, this would also allow the use of a predefined workload plan (e.g., 8 hours per day) for future capacity forecasting, while using the recorded data to reflect actual working hours for past periods.