JIRA Portfolio - team capacity

[Ron Grosberg]

Hi,

We're exploring jira portfolio now (in the past I evaluated portfolio1.0 and it wasn't enough for me)

I am trying to understand some things about capacity....

I manually put weekly hours for every team member in my shared team. interesting enough - when I go to my portfolio plan into teams I see that the teams have a default capacity of 200 hours, regardless of the number of team members or their weekly hours...

Am I missing something? is there a specific reason why the team will not, at least, set the default to the aggregated number of weekly hours of all members?

[Thomas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Ron Grosberg ,

Individual capacity planning is not a feature we've added back yet to the Portfolio 3 improved interface (See https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiraportfolioserver/future-releases-and-limitations-953663163.html).

This is a feature we're looking at actively and would welcome any additional feedback, you can provide in-app feedback and more details on your use-case to help the team better understand what the right solution would be.

Cheers,

Thomas

[Ron Grosberg]

Thanks! that's good to know. I think it's important that we will be able to have specific capacities. and in general I would love to work with someone from Atlassian and bring up our needs.  In my previous work I had a lot of experience working with JIRA and portfolio wasn't good enough for us back then, we had to use external tools, I would love to be able to use JIRA and nothing else

[Scott Stephens]

Yes there needs to be a better view like there was in 2.0 "Capacity report"  For my company this is a showstopper for embracing.  It appears you can only view this in the sprint pop up window but there is no planning mechanism of view where you can see over time the teams capacity and current allocation and then switch it to individuals in the team.

[Sean O_Dell]

I'm not sure how useful auto-scheduling is without the ability to take individual capacity into account. If I have a team of 10 people, but only 2 of them are assigned to tasks in a given Portfolio, they are both treated like a single entity. If I set team capacity to 400, both of those people will end up assigned to as much as 400 hours of work in a single sprint. If I create a team with just those two, and set capacity to 80 hours, it's possible, due to dependencies, that one of them would be scheduled for 80 hours of work in a single sprint. How does scheduling at the team level with team capacity produce accurate schedules? The only way I see that working is if all issues are left unassigned, and then the work is split evenly by people on the team. The problem with that approach is that not everyone has the same skills nor the same availability.

I just can't think of a scenario where it's useful to plan at the team level.

[Roi Fine]

Hi all,

Firstly, thanks for your feedback

Our approach for capacity planning in Portfolio 3.x is more lightweight than the older versions. Nonetheless, we have plans to improve the capabilities to make it simple yet powerful.

Coming soon is the ability to adjust the planned velocity/capacity for teams to plan for diminishing or rising velocity. This would allow accounting for holidays, people leaving the team, etc.. when planning work further ahead. 

Also, we will soon introduce the ability to sort by assignees so when you group by teams and show sprints on the timeline, you'll be able to quickly see who has too much work assigned.

I'd love to hear your feedback.

Roi | Product Manager

[Ron Grosberg]

Thanks Roi!

From  my point of view, one of the most important things is the connection between JIRA and portfolio. I think that capacity of a team need to be something that is part of JIRA core, and not just part of portfolio, and that portfolio needs to utilise this information to show the bigger picture.

As I see it from my last 2 management roles and speaking to other managers as well, one of the biggest pains of using JIRA specifically and agile methodology in general is having to use 2 different tools to do long-term planning (including projects, capacity etc) and for the day-to-day agile.

Every time you do something proprietary in portfolio, it makes it less valuable as it is similar to using another separate tool.... 

That's my 2 cents....

On another note we are on the verge of finishing our 3 months trial of portfolio and I haven't been able to prove myself that I can get value from it. 
I'd be really happy to work with someone and get some guidance to how you would suggest using it to get as much value as possible.

I have to admit that I am reluctant to use TFS as it is not as user-friendly as JIRA is, but they allow some things that make it much easier to do long-term planning...

[Roi Fine]

Hi @Ron Grosberg ,

Sorry to hear that,

I would love to chat and learn what prevents you from realizing Portfolio's value. Feel free to schedule time with me in this link

Cheers,

Roi

[Scott Stephens]

Whatever is added into Portfolio 3 there needs to be a view like Big Picture has which I have attached.  There was this type within the 2.0.  I would expect this in the 3.0.    Here you can view and plan the impact of reassignment or adding new tickets to a resource or team.  In order for me to enable my POC work with Portfolio as well as validate the price to my stakeholders this needs to occur.  Keeping my fingers crossed.