Looking for input on how best to do capacity planning and resource planning in JIRA Software cloud. We have a set of workstreams that are working in a kanban fashion, handling tasks across a multitude of projects based on priority managed by PMO and resource manager. We do not have good data for estimation of tasks, or historical data around how much time spent on tasks.
Looking for advice on how to best get started to get to a place where we can do solid estimation, and have ability to understand capacity in these workstreams.
Thanks!
Ken
I think you should try to see that there are two separate exercises here: 1. gathering the data (a. your list of resources, b. what their working schedules are, c. how many hours a day they have to work on each project, d. what the list of tasks is, e. how much time each task will take, f. when each task is due) 2. choosing a tool with which to track and manage your resource allocations
My opinion: #1 is much more difficult, and can be worked on independently of tool selection. Theoretically, if you have all the #1s, you could use Excel or a good whiteboard (exaggerating a bit but you get my point).
I use BigPicture for #2 and I love it, but we do all waterfall. BP is well suited for conventional project mgmt and lends itself really well to linear SDLCs and waterfall projects. I do not know how helpful it will be for Kanban, but you could ask the vendor, or get the free trial and play with it.
All tooling aside, you're right, the difficult part of this is getting the task level of effort.
this article might help:
https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimation
And then there's brainstorming:
1. See if there's any historical places you can look at (if you have a timesheet system either in JIRA like Tempo, or outside of JIRA)
2. or if you use hourly rate or 1099 employees they probably submit timesheets.
3. You can ask the task owners to give you an estimate to start with.
4. If you have any other project managers around who use MS Project outside of JIRA maybe they have some of the tasks in prior project plans.
5. if you've been using JIRA for a while, and filling in story points, you could mine the resolved issues.
at a certain point you just have to pick a number and go with it, and adjust as you go along.
Make sure that when people give you the estimates, that you are looking for the 'Work'. That's what MS-Project calls it. JIRA calls it the 'Original Estimate' field (which you can configure to be either hours or story points). It is also known by humans as the level of effort (LOE). Most tasks are what MS-Project calls "fixed work tasks". That means the the amount of Work to be done stays the same, but could go faster or slower by adding or removing people.
So the Work or OE, is the # of hours it will take regardless of how many people work on it, and regardless of how much of their time they can spend on this task vs others.
Another way to say this is, the Work is NOT the duration. If a task is 16 hours of Work,and 2 people work on it full time, then it will take only 1 day in duration.
I hope this helps and I hope I didn't clutter up your answer with a bunch of stuff you already know. And there is no easy answer!
Good luck