Is it possible to change the capacity for a team over time in a Portfolio plan?

[Paul Tiplady]

One fairly common thing that can happen is that a team grows, so that its capacity will increase over time. In a typical roadmap we might model this as changes to capacity on a quarterly basis.

Is there a way to represent this in Portfolio? All I've found is the ability to set a fixed capacity, which is not very useful for any planning further than the current quarter.

[Earl McCutcheon · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul,

To increase the capacity of the team this is going to be a manual adjustment to the static teams capacity as one off events while time progresses.

However you can use combinations of virtual users and set absences or start and end dates to denote a timeframe where the availability of a team member will be increased or reduced to impact the capacity in various ways.

For your scenario of increasing the capacity gradually, while there is not a global method to inflate capacity on an interval you can create a virtual team member and adjust the global availability of that user so that they have a future Start date range, and after that period or during that range the virtual user will fill the gap for the existing team members, See following screenshot for exe but refer to docs listed below for full steps to set the availability start date:

Then once you progress to the point that the capacity is accurately being recorded on the virtual user you could manually update the team capacity and remove the virtual user.

Details on these actions can be seen in the following documentation:

• Configuring the availability of team members
• Adding and removing teams and team members
• Managing shared teams

Regards,
Earl

[Peter Backes]

Yep, this is a great feature set (virtual users and start/end dates) before version 3.0 of Portfolio for Jira but it has since been removed. Not pleased.

[JCameron]

Very disappointing that none of the functionality described here is available anymore. We're trying to migrate away from project, which lets me essentially create a team with a hiring plan (i.e. a capacity calendar). Having a fixed size team for an entire year in a growing company is completely unrealistic.

We're really not liking the capacity estimation functionality in Plans so far. It's very difficult to evaluate our actual plans and long-term schedules.