Capacity of Individual Team Members?

[Heila Al-Mogren]

Hello,

We’re looking for some help regarding the advanced roadmaps.

We’re essentially trying to find a way to ensure that the work distribution in the plan is fair and the amount of total work hours assigned to each member is reasonable, so we’ve been trying to find a way to view the capacity of the individual team members (based on the issue estimation) but couldn’t a find a way to do that until the moment.

Here is an example, something like this table that shows each member and the total estimated hours assigned to them for every day:

[Earl McCutcheon · Accepted solution]

Hello @Heila Al-Mogren ,

Capacity in Advanced Roadmaps is currently visible on a per-team basis and does not have a per-user option.  

There was previously a feature that broke down individual capacity, but per end-user feedback, the option was removed in favor of team capacity.  These changes were put into effect when we launched version 3.0 of Portfolio (renamed to Advanced Roadmaps), the changes are covered in the following documentation, noting that it is a Jira Server document as the changes occurred when the application was a server-only option but has since become available in Jira Cloud:

• https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfolioserver/changes-in-the-new-experience-961780550.html

Managing capacity

Previously, you'd be able to plan the individual capacity of your team members.

In the improved interface, individual capacity planning is replaced by team capacity planning. When auto-scheduling a plan, the total capacity of a team to complete the work being scheduled will be taken into account. To do this, you must directly set team capacity in your plan.

There is some additional insight on the direction of team capacity in the following comment from Roi Fine, the Advanced Pradmaps Product manager:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2562?focusedCommentId=2307189&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-2307189

Roi Fine added a comment - 17/Nov/2019 6:51 PM

Hi team,

Firstly, thanks for your feedback. We noted your feature suggestion.

The approach for capacity planning in the new UI is more lightweight.

We are constantly building more features in this area. But are our main focus at the moment is to build more features around the team capacity and/or ** velocity, rather than individuals'.  

Portfolio's mission is to be the "team of teams" agile planning tool. To drive that first, we need to surface teams' velocities and allow effective what-if scenario planning based on those.

If that approach doesn't work, I'd love to hear why, and remind you that you can always switch to the old interface.

I hope the above makes sense.

Roi | Product Manager

The following feature requests are where we are taking feedback on adding individual capacity back into Advanced Roadmaps.  If you have the time to do so please add a comment noting your use case and how the feature would impact your workflow.

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-20434
• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-20792

Regards,
Earl

[Sari Ollikainen]

"We are constantly building more features in this area. But are our main focus at the moment is to build more features around the team capacity and/or ** velocity, rather than individuals'.  

Hope you will change the decision to focus team capacity and start to develop individual capacity features. Individual belong to teams naturally and each individuals may have different capacity in a team during one sprint. There is good amount of explanations for the need to create the feature described in 20434 feedback as well as available in the other backlog handling tools. 

[Phil Smith]

Working with a large team requires the ability to manage individual capacity. Taking away that capability to do it in Jira, without purchasing a third party app, was a really bad idea. 

[Satish Kumar]

Infact i'm considering to move away from Jira to rally just because of this shortcoming. Its a blunder in product feature management. 

[Dean Wheatley]

Individual capacity planning is one of the first features I am looking for from Jira Roadmaps. The decision to remove it is unfortunate. Please bring back that feature.

[Maurizio Mancini]

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to provide some historical background on the removal of the Individual capacity management from the previous version of Advanced roadmaps. 

@Earl McCutcheon, the statement that the old version of Advanced roadmaps had individual capacity management is partially true but it came with many shortcomings.

The individual capacity management that used to exist in Portfolio for Jira (old Advanced Roadmaps), used to provide a capacity view that assumed that whatever was assigned to someone would all be done (all the effort points or hours) by that person (which is often not correct when it comes to using a User Story approach) and then it would look at the unassigned work to be done by a team and do a simple calculation that took the number of team resources and it would divided by the effort (points or time estimate) and assumed it was evenly distributed amongst team members. The functionality was at “best” a guess of a resources capacity. It was really not usable to any degree of confidence for managing individual capacity.

When Roi was redesigning the new Advanced Roadmaps with the team at the time, I was one of the people that was consulted (along with other people from other organizations) on what was required. When it came to Individual Capacity Management we simply discussed that what was needed was something similar to what Tempo Planner and BigPicture do and we even reviewed a very early prototype.

Having said that, I can understand the challenge of implementing individual capacity management given what I have seen over the years of working with clients that try to implement individual resource management. Here is what I have encountered over the years and this may help provide some insight on why individual capacity management is a challenge. 

When speaking with clients they often come with expectations that tools be able to do any number of these things when it comes to capacity management:

• they often are trying to replicate the functionality of Microsoft project and/or Excel
• however they want more control than Microsoft Project and/or Excel provides
• they want to be able to allocate resources early on a project by skill and a percentage required
• they want to be able to allocate a percentage of a resource to a project
• they often have resources working on multiple projects
• they want to know when a resource is under booked or over booked across projects
• they often have a mix of teams that use shared resources that work in any combination of Kanban, Scrum or waterfall
• they may or may not enter actual estimates in Jira for the work
• they may or may not enter time in Jira for the work done but often you see teams entering time in another system by the discipline (Dev, QA etc…) for time spent
• and they want the teams to keep the plans updated live so they know the status at any point in time
• and they want the system to be able to predict if a project is on track or not
• and they want all of this with the least amount of data entry effort. The system has to almost do it automagically!

….

What I have also seen over the years, is that even the most sophisticated capacity management tools require a lot of effort to setup and enter the data needed to do capacity management.

I have seen organizations start with the best of intentions on using these more sophisticated tools and then as the people in the trenches are asked to enter data and keep things up to date, the effort required quickly becomes an impediment to the continued use of the sophisticated tool and it ends up on the sidelines and not being used. People then default to using Excel or Microsoft Project. Aside from the effort required to keep the more sophisticed systems up to date, it is often the different approaches to resource management that teams take in an organization that make it challenging to use even the most sophisticated planning tools.

Even the APPS that do capacity management in the Atlassian marketplace today, face some of the challenges that are listed above.

Maybe this is an area where AI may play a more prominent role in the near future but let’s see where that goes…

I hope that my 2 cents has provided some historical context on what happened with Advanced Roadmaps and why the implementation of Individual Capacity Management is not always as easy as it seems.

Thank you!

[Tara L Conklin]

@Earl McCutcheon I just added my comments and vote to 20434. We just upgraded to Jira Premium because of Advanced Roadmaps and without the ability to adjust a plan to account for individual PTO, holidays, training etc at the sprint level it seems impossible to create any semblance of a useful plan. The team capacity is 'set it and forget it' and applies to the entire plan, which is simply not logical. 

How are the teams at Atlassian creating accurate plans in AR? How are you accounting for a team member out due to vacation or unexpected medical issues? These are temporary adjustments that need to be accounted for. 

[Matt Neal]

I couldn't agree more. I would love individual capacity and to be able to adjust it on a weekly basis.

[Laura Reilly]

For this reason, I can never, ever give up my MS Project.  I'm sure when users asked for ability to view Team capacity, they did not envision losing the individual capacity to meet the request!  For project planning, features such as individual calendars, project priority, task priority, estimated hours or work, remaining work (this one is key!), allocation (by project and by task) and resource leveling based upon priority are a must to accurately project the end date. I end up manually gathering this from Jira and team members right now. I manage about 10 releases simulaneously, all at different stages, and had some hope the Advanced Roadmap could make the plans more accessible for leadership and team members to view upcoming releases and their work but the Advanced Roadmap will always make it seem like work will be done 25-50% faster than will truly occur due to the limited accuracy of the Capacity Planning single value.  

[Hanieh Katebian]

Hello everyone, 

I have been looking for this function for some time now and I'm sure that I saw a video about the individual capacity planning somewhere while ago. I have a big team to work with and the individual capacity planning helps me to see who is overbooked with tasks and who is running low. Seeing the answers above made me realize that the function was there before and now removed. I also watched the Youtube link but it doesn't offer me what I'm looking for. Is there any other function that could help me with the individual planning in advanced Jira roadmaps?

[Earl McCutcheon]

@Tara L Conklin ,

Check out the following Vido our program managers put together of how we use Advanced roadmaps internally, it has some good info that relates to your question:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz7GthQSP0o

Regards,
Earl