Capacity Planning for Capacities with varying hours per day

Question

Hello,

I'm new to Jira and hope to get some insights from you good people.

We are exploring the possibility and feasibility of planning work for our 3D printer farm using Jira.

The timeline and tools in the "Plan" space seems very promissing, but we run into the problem that we can't tell Jira that printers work 24 hours a day. Since we also want to plan for our human capacities, that's a problem.

So I guess I'm looking for any specific solution to this, or just your generel thoughts or experience with implementing something like this in Jira.

Thanks in advance,
Tobias

Tobias Jønch · Answer

Thanks Dave.

I'll elaborate a bit, though you're pretty much spot on.

We want to have a better overview of overall print orders, to make sure we can deliver on time, don't take in too many orders etc.

We currently have 25 printers, soon to be expanded by another 10 or so.

Since I'm still learning Jira I went ahead and implemented some of the features we hoped for, as a learning exercise:

* A field for 'Quantity' (number of prints)
* A field for 'Time per print'
* A field for 'Total time' (calculated)
* A custom Issue Type for 3D printing, along with contextual screen.

An order would then turn into a 3D print task with the various specifics.

As you suggested we would then like to create a Printer team with such-and-such capacity in hours per week.

We could then use the timeline to plan orders and achieve that overview we're lacking.

Human resources is not in the picture as of yet, but probably will be down the line.

Hope this provides a clearer picture. 
Thanks again!

Dave Mathijs · Answer

I understand. Maybe let's start with the why:

* What are you trying to achieve?
* What is your goal?
* How many printer are we talking about? Dozens, hundreds?
* Do you consider a print job as a task with an estimate of x number of hours?
* Would you like to calculate capacity based on the sum of "print jobs"?
* Are these tasks (work items) tied to human resources as well?

Can you provide a mockup of your process and capacity flow?

Tobias Jønch · Answer

Thanks for your reply :)

We did consider this. The problem is we have quite a lot of printers and a handful of paid apps, so the cost would not be negligible.