Timeline Planning (Resource and Effort vs. Future Month)

Michael Caplan

A planning exercise that I'd really absorb into Jira or Jira Product Discovery is our timelining work. 

 

When evaluating our future timelined roadmap, we look at 1) The Idea, 2) The effort, and 3) The person (or team) leading it.  We need to look at each future month to see who is assigned what 1) idea to work on,  how much 2) effort we have allocated to each 3) person and what is the sum effort allocated to the month itself.  

We use story points to define effort.  We know that as a group we can handle certain ranges of story points per month.  When planning a future month, we need to make sure that the total story points allocated across ideas don't exceed our story point budget.  We do this by either reducing scope of the idea, or spreading the idea across numerous months.  

Here is a little visual to help define the analysis.  The sum under the month is the total story points.  The idea is prefix with story points.  Some ideas will stretch over numerous months, and the story points are divided accordingly. 



I never could fit this type of analysis into the Jira Timeline.  It lacks on story points summing as far as I can tell.

I just started playing with Jira Product Discovery.  I really like allot of what I see.  Decoupling the idea from the jira ticket, and the ideation tooling is brilliant.  Linking to Jira tickets is great to turn ideas into implementation plans and story point sizing.

But it too doesn't seem to allow this capacity like planning when using the timeline view.


Or am I missing something.  Any ideas on how I can approximate this type of planning data in Product Discover or Jira native?

 

Thanks,

 

Mike

 

Olga Springer

Thank you for sharing your proposed approach. I’ll make sure to pass this along to the Jira Product Discovery product team.

That said, I do want to provide some additional context. While your visual is intentionally simplified, in practice, most projects span multiple months. Because of that, achieving the type of solution you’re illustrating directly within the timeline view can be quite challenging.

Currently, Jira Product Discovery supports high-level capacity planning rather than detailed allocation management. Within my team, we rely on two timeline views:

1. Initiatives assigned to the team – This view displays all initiatives along with frontend and backend estimates shown directly on the tiles. It helps us ensure we’re not spreading ourselves across too many initiatives simultaneously and allows us to reprioritize when necessary.

2. Team initiatives grouped by individual – This view enables us to verify that each team member has planned allocations aligned with upcoming initiatives. The initiative tiles also display all assigned project members, which gives us quick visibility into ownership and distribution.

You can also find this video useful: demo.

If you’re looking for more advanced capacity planning capabilities (e.g., detailed allocation tracking, cross-team dependencies, or scenario planning), I recommend exploring Jira Plans, which is designed specifically for that level of planning sophistication.

Olga Springer
Sr. Product Manager, Jira Product Discovery