Kanban: predict delivery date based on issue estimate and position in queue

Matthieu Cornillon November 20, 2019

Someone is doing work for multiple stakeholders.  Their work is tracked in a Jira kanban board.  They estimate their work in hours, which for their particular type of work (relatively low unpredictability) ends up pretty accurate.

The stakeholders are responsible for working with each other to sort out the priority of tasks.  They can easily do this from the standpoint of relative importance, but I want them to be able to take into account the relative size of items.

Example:

  • It is Monday morning
  • Stakeholder A's request:
    • critical importance to company
    • estimate: 4 hrs
    • needed by Friday
  • Stakeholder B's request:
    • medium importance to company
    • estimate: 14 hrs
    • needed by Tue EOD

On a strictly importance-based prioritization, Stakeholder A's request goes first.  But with a deadline-based prioritization, putting Stakeholder B's request first allows both requests to be finished in time.

Obviously, it is important for the stakeholders to talk to each other, so I am not looking for a formula to skip the conversation.  What I am looking for is an easy way for stakeholders to see when they can expect their request to be complete.  I imagine something that simply says "given current time, working days/hours, position in queue, and estimates of items,  return delivery date".  I know this is risky for other reasons and can educate around that, but I'm looking for a rough tool here.

In the case above, if the items were prioritized as A then B, Stakeholder A would see a projected delivery of Monday, and Stakeholder B would see a projected delivery of Wednesday.  This would alert Stakeholder B of the need to talk to Stakeholder A, since their item would not otherwise meet the Tuesday deadline.

Obviously simple when there are only two requests and two stakeholders, but my reality is a lot more complicated.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

 

 

3 answers

1 vote
Danut M _StonikByte_
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May 6, 2020

Hi Andy,

Sorry for this. I did not realize that answering old posts (some of them were still open) can be a violation of the guidelines. Our product now solves that specific problem and I was trying to make the people aware of this as a potential solution. Anyway, I will consider these recommendations on further posts. 

Danut.

0 votes
Andy Heinzer
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 5, 2020

Hi @Danut M _StonikByte_ 

Thanks for posting a potential solution here.  While this original post is just under 6 months old, it seems that you have updated a number of other much older posts to spread the word about this solution.

For those other threads, this is against our Atlassian Community online guidelines for Marketplace vendors and Solution Partners.  Please review these.  Specifically, those other posts would be considered necroposting.  I'm happy to leave this response on this thread because it's just under the 6 month window from the time the question was asked.

Thanks

Andy

0 votes
Danut M _StonikByte_
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May 5, 2020

Hi @Matthieu Cornillon 

 

Try our Great Gadgets app. It offers a Kanban Velocity gadget that also predicts the ETA of the issues based on the team velocity. Take a look here: https://bitbucket.org/StonikByte/great-gadgets-add-on/wiki/Home#!kanban-velocity-gadget

 

Danut 

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