what if my skills are not homogenous per epic/story

Question

Hi,

we are trying out portfolio to see how we can manage our planning better.

We now have competence based teams (platform, java, C++, C#) who all work on 1 product.

We do want to go to 4 or 5 integrated feature teams that have a mix of all these competences. So "skills" would be ideal for me to use.

However, not all our epics have the same % needed for every competence. Sometimes most of the work will need to be done by java, sometimes the java team has almost nothing to do for an epic.

But I can only set my skills at plan-level.

How to use skills in this setup? The plan will now schedule C++ guys on platform tasks or vica versa, and that won't fly

thanks,

Filip

Filip Baert · Answer

Hi Ryan, thanks for the answer.

by "set your estimate on individual skill" you mean "create a task, put an estimate on it and assign it manually to a person"?

If so, this looks ok for short term (sprint) planning, but makes it quite hard to make predictions on skill need on longer term using the tool.

Ryan Porter1 · Answer

The percentages in the skills settings are defaults.  If you estimate the time and you don't break it down by skill then it will implicitly break down according to those percentages.  If that's not applicable then you can set your estimates on the individual skills instead, and the estimate for the issue will become the sum of all of those.

For my teams, virtually zero of the issues that we file match the defaults.  We wish that we could disable the feature somehow because it has no benefit to us and it makes entering time estimates a lot more complicated.  There are aggravating bugs in JIRA Portfolio 2 that sometimes make it impossible to adjust the estimates.  You end up playing a stupid game of whack-a-mole as Portfolio resets your estimates after you type them in, to try to distribute the estimate out over those default skill percentages.