How to track total effort put into tasks on a weekly period on a next gen project?

[Zaine Abaddin]

I have a next project and am using it as a simple Kanban style board. I am not using Sprints and so not able to utilise story points estimates.

However I want to be able to have some point system where i can assign a number to signify the effort a task will take. So, I've created a custom drop-down list with numbers ranging from 1-6.

What I am trying to achieve with this:

Create a chart on the dashboard to add up those numbers for each task within the "In progress" column and display them in a graph ordered by date.

Why:

I want to know how much effort i am putting in in a week to completing these tasks and whether I am giving myself more than I can take on board.

I was unable to use any of the gadgets to achieve this.

How can i track what I explained above?

I would greatly appreciate the help.

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi Zaine,

I understand that you're using a next-gen Kanban project in Jira Cloud and you are looking for some means to track estimation of issues.  I see that you have created a custom field to try to track these efforts without the use of sprints or story points.  However the use of story points is actually possible to enable in next-gen software projects, even Kanban projects, without manually creating a custom field like you have done here. 

At least in the current version of next-gen projects, you can edit the project settings, then go to Features.  Within this feature section, you can enable Estimations for this project here, even for next-gen Kanban projects. 

Doing this will grant you the ability to use story points as an estimation statistic for these issues.  From there, when you edit these issues you can give them their own estimation of effort here. 

For example, you can then just look at the backlog, and use the quick filter to only see issues assigned to you.  This quickly can show you the story points of 'to do', 'in progress', and done for your account. 

Granted this is not graphing this data in a historical or graphed view as you have asked for here, but it can at least show you the story points for issues currently on the board of issues assigned to you. 

But I understand this is not exactly what you are looking for here.  While the dashboard gadgets do not appear to have exactly what I think you are looking for here, instead I would be interested to see if perhaps the project reporting section might be more useful here.  Again this is another project feature that has to be enabled in the project settings for a next-gen project, but once enabled, you gain access to reports such as burnup, sprint burndown, and a cumulative flow diagram.  By utilizing the native story points feature, these reports take on additional usefulness here that the use of custom fields for estimation won't be as useful here.  You do not need to have the sprints feature enabled in the project in order to use these story point estimations, but if you want to utilizing most of the built in reporting features, the sprints feature is required for most of these.

I would suggest trying to use the burnup report here.  It can at least give you a guidelines for the sprint as a team in terms of how much work would need to be completed across the interval of the sprint.  It doesn't provide individual end user guides of their work, but if you're willing to try to use sprints to organize this work, this report does at least help to give you an idea of how much work is being completed on the board during the sprint interval.  

Sorry if this is not exactly what you are looking for here, but I hope that the suggestions above can at least provide you some of the insights I think you are looking for here within a next-gen Kanban project.

Andy