Advanced roadmap sprint capacity management and loading for epics (even / frontloaded)

[James Sui]

Hi all,

Setting up my team to use the advanced roadmapping tool for planning and execution. Quick question regarding how pointed epics are allocated into sprints. Currently the work seems to be front loaded into the first available sprint (see screenshot below), however it would be more beneficial for planning if the points were evenly distributed over the projected sprints due to siloing and specialization.

Example: Epic is 48 points, each sprint is 30 points, ideally I'd like each sprint to be loaded up to 16 points each. However current loading is 30 points in the first sprint and 18 points in the second sprint.

I know this could potentially be done by dividing teams up into more granualar subsets, however that would introduce more overhead on the sprint management side of things.

Thanks in advance!

[Suvarna Gaikwad]

@James Sui Story points are allocated among sprints based on Sprint Velocity.

Default is 30 Story points. However it can be set using available settings i.e. Teams.  PFB below screenshot.

Click on Teams -> Edit existing team or add new team -> Edit Sprint Velocity as per your requirement. PFB screenshot.

Hope this helps.

[James Sui]

Understood here. Thanks!

More so, I want for the efforts to evenly distribute story points over the sprints.

Example: 30 points per sprint, 48 point effort

Current (frontloaded)

Sprint 1: 30

Sprint 2: 18

Sprint 3: 0

Desired (evenly distributed)

Sprint 1: 16

Sprint 2: 16

Sprint 3: 16

[Suvarna Gaikwad]

@James Sui if you change sprint velocity to 16, it will evenly distribute 48 story points among 3 sprints like 16 story points per sprint.

However if your total story points increase to say 50, it will divide like 16(sprint 1), 16(sprint 2), 16(sprint 3), 2 (sprint 4) as per sprint velocity.

Please note sprint velocity is your team capacity. You should set sprint velocity to number of story points your team is capable of completing per sprint. If your team is capable of taking care of say 20 story points and just to evenly distribute story points across sprints, you are setting velocity to 16, it means your team capacity is under utilized per sprint. In other words, it's not about even distribution but it's about utilizing team's capacity at it's fullest.

Hope this clarifies your query.

[James Sui]

Gotcha cool cool. Maybe my use case isn't supported here / maybe there is another solution to this.

Ideally I want to be able to schedule/forecast multiple epics in parallel. ie if we have 2 initiatives we are supporting in the same sprint.