Capacity planner for distributed teams?

Question

Hi everyone,

I was wondering how you guys handle time zones and part-time work?

The thing is that our team is fully distributed. Some team members work in the EST zone, and some work in the GMT zone. We also have part-time contractors. Also, naturally, people have different holidays and PTO.

Ideally, we need a workload/capacity tool that lets us:

- Set working hours per person (e.g., 6h/day, 8h/day, etc.)
- Account for time zone differences when planning meetings/overlap
- Handle part-time allocation across projects
- See real capacity versus just a default 8-hour day

Every tool I've tried assumes everyone works 8 hours a day.

Thanks a lot

Mehmet A _Bloompeak_ · Answer

Hi @Alice Blaese

Managing capacity for distributed teams is tricky—especially when team members span different time zones, observe local national holidays or have varying working hours and availability.

If you need a visual and user-centric capacity planning experience to handle these distributed teams, you can try Sprint Capacity Planner for Jira developed by our team.

This app supports distributed team workflows by offering:

* Team Time-Off Management: Easily configure non-working days or company holidays in global settings to automatically adjust team availability.

* Flexible Individual Capacity & Leaves: Set individual capacity and individual vacation days for each team member based on their location and schedule.

* Estimation Flexibility: Choose between Story Points or Remaining Estimate with custom point-to-hour conversion rules depending of your team's workflow

* Visual Drag-and-Drop Calendar: Easily drag work items across the Backlog, Active Sprint and Future Sprints. Place and reorder work items anywhere on the timeline calendar to define their precise execution sequence

* Capacity Indicators: Spot over-allocation instantly with color-coded capacity indicators (Green: Fully utilizing available capacity, Blue: Has remaining available capacity and Red: Over-allocated)

* Real-Time Sprint Progress: Monitor active sprint health with live On Track / Behind Plan status indicators and real-time Planned, Done and Target metrics.

For further details, you can have a look at Smart Capacity Planning and Real-Time Sprint Health in Jira article.

If you have any questions, feel free to schedule a call with us.

Hope this helps!

Hempel · Answer

Welcome to the community, @Alice Blaese !

For distributed teams specifically, Tempo Capacity Planner lets you set up multiple teams with their own linked projects. The Resource Planning view shows availability and planned hours across all of them, and if someone is shared across teams, you set their availability percentage per team — the Team Capacity Report then shows total commitment across all projects, so you can spot over-commitment before it becomes a problem.

Docs on this exact scenario: https://help.tempo.io/planner/latest/managing-shared-resources
Disclosure: I work for the team behind Tempo.

Rahul_RVS · Answer

Hi @Alice Blaese

Welcome to the community !!

If you would like to try a mktplace app for tracking resource workload and capacity planning across multiple projects/boards, take a look at

Capacity Planner

The app offers:

1. Resource Tracking and Allocation : The app allows you to monitor and track various resources by adding them as part of a template, and their work allocation across multiple projects / sprints. The capacity can be allocated partial as well for each project/sprint.

2. Real-time Visualization: Provides intuitive charts, graphs to visualize resource utilization and capacity levels in real-time.

3. Full Sprint / Project Fix version Capacity and Monitoring

Mode details here

Disclaimer : I am one of the app team member