If the same people work on more than one Jira project, the question "who can take the next piece of work?" is surprisingly hard to answer from Jira alone. Jira is organised around issues and projects; staffing is organised around people. Many teams end up keeping a separate spreadsheet that has to be updated by hand.
Whatever tool you use, five habits make capacity visible:
1. Pick one planning unit and stick to it.
Plan either as a share of each person's capacity (for example 50%) or in person-days. Mixing both makes totals meaningless.
2. Plan against real working time.
A person's capacity is not the same every week. Working days, hours per day and public holidays change it, so put them into the plan.
3. Record allocations, not just assignments.
An allocation is a person + a project or team + a date range + a share of capacity. Ticket assignees tell you who is doing what today; allocations tell you who is committed next month.
4. Look at people, not only projects.
Review the plan by person at least weekly: who is above 100%, who has room, and whose current allocation ends soon. "Ending soon" is the cheapest moment to plan the next assignment.
5. Plan the people you are about to hire, too.
If a new hire or contractor starts next month, add them as a placeholder so the plan is honest before they have an account.
Doing this inside Jira
Disclosure: I work at DS Solution, and we build Resource Planning for Jira, a free app for Jira Cloud that follows this approach. It lets you:
- plan allocations as a percentage or in man-days, following your working days, hours and public holidays;
- switch between a view by person and a view by project or organisation unit;
- spot under-utilized and overloaded people early and see which allocations are ending soon;
- plan guest resources before they have Jira accounts (and replace a guest with a Jira user later; the replacement cannot be undone);
- filter allocations and export them to CSV.
Setup order matters: create an organisation unit first, link your Jira projects to it, then add allocations. App admins and unit leaders plan for others; members edit their own.
If it is useful: Resource Planning for Jira on the Atlassian Marketplace. How do you handle cross-project capacity today? I am happy to answer questions in the comments.
