Capacity Planning for Kanban board

[David Leal]

The documentation about capacity planning is referring to Scrum projects, but it doesn't mention that it is not possible for Kanban projects. I have a plan for three Kanban boards (issue source set to Board). Is it possible to do capacity planning for Kanban projects and if so, how, do you know about any guideline/example/video on how to use it for this scenario?

When look in to capacity information in the timeline, it assumes the Kanban iteration is considered for a week of work (starting on Sundays). I was not able to find a way to configure a different iteration length. How we can customize Kanban iteration within the plan? Is it possible to define an iteration of two weeks?

Under a week iteration by default it considers as capacity 6 days instead of 5 working days. I was not able to change that on the global setting, I can change one by one, but this is not feasible for large project/program, where we have a high number of weeks and teams to do it one by one. Is there a way to have a global setting where to change that?

I realized that it provides capacity only when Estimates (d) field is populated at epic/story level. In such cases the way the information is populated is via Original Estimate field as story level. I verified that. So for Kanban project we need to use this field for estimation instead of points, because under Advanced Roadmaps for Kanban points are not take into consideration. 

When I defined my teams I defined the weekly capacity in hours, but it doesn't take that into consideration, because the capacity is always the number of days, but we have more than on team member per team. How we can interpret such capacity information? Is it possible that this information by default gets populated from Team Capacity? 

Please take into consideration that all the highlighted questions are related to planning with Kanban boards not Scrum. Thanks for any help!

[David Leal · Accepted solution]

Let's try to responde to myself to some of the questions based on what I have researched around this topic:

1. Yes, you can use capacity for Kanban project, following the same guideline for Scrum project. We need to define source issues by Board. Define the teams, link to issue source and specify the capacity in hours
2. Verified that the weekly capacity for the team takes into consideration the capacity defined in hours for the team (not the number of team members that are part of the team). If we consider for example 30 hours per team member per week, it will represent 3.75 days per week per story for example. Which is calculated 30/40=0.75 then: 0.75X5 working days results in 3.75 capacity contribution per week per issue with work planned for that week. If the team has 6 team members, the weekly capacity will be then: 3.75X6=22.5 days per week. This is how the weekly capacity gets populated by default, then you can adjust some specific weeks manually.
3. I don't think for Kanban boards we can specify the iteration length. The capacity view only considers by week of work.

Thanks,

[Michał Pietrasik]

Do you maybe already know how the plugin decides which week is the task assigned to for future planning ?

I have situation like below. For current week i have 25 days of capacity, already almost full as the work is done now. But i would like to have future weeks filled based on estimations for tickets which are somehow assigned to them. I can also see that for some reason one week in mid April is half full, bud still don't know why :)  I think it should match issues target date, but looks like it is something different.

[Michał Pietrasik]

Figured it out myself. It matches "target start", but calculates only items where original estimate is really populated, estimates in subtasks are not taken into calculation.