Can I limit the number of issues allowed to be assigned to a specific assignee for each due date?

[Austin Adams]

My company currently uses Jira Software Cloud to manage our recurring marketing tasks each month. We have different teams that our account managers assign different issue types to as the assignee, then those teams (the new assignee) assign the tasks to a specific person (i.e. I would assign my image creation issue to Team A - Creative. They would then assign it to the available creative team member). I want to limit the number of tasks, subtasks, or issues able to be assigned to a team in a single day because we often have people exceeding the limit of a team's queue (typically around 25 tasks per day) and because it's manual things get moved that have been there for a long time. We also have an estimated time field we could limit if that would work easier. I have a general example of what each looks like below.

In the time estimate if we can limit it if the total estimated time for the due date gets to X automatically move it to the next day (if that day was full it would continue to move it forward until it reached a day that it didn't exceed the limit). For the total issues for one assignee on a single due date, I want to know if we can do the same but with issue count. If total issue count = X, schedule for the next day (and continue to do so until the automation doesn't exceed the issue count). 

Let me know if you need any further explanations. Thanks!

[Ostap Zaishlyi _Reliex_]

Hi @Austin Adams 

I'm representative of ActivityTimeline plugin for Jira, and using our plugin you can define the capacity of the resource in the number of tasks per day:

And if there are more tasks assigned to a user at any given day, you'll see that on the workload indicator:

Or run a report to see if there are any bottlenecks:

But I also have to agree with @Brant Schroeder that automation in this case is not ideal, as it won't ensure that the correct tasks are done within their due dates and not postponed.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Austin Adams welcome to the Atlassian community 

You could use automation to limit the number of issues based on the criteria you provided.  The issue you would run into would be the moving it forward until it meets the criteria.  

I would suggest using boards and the proper scheduling of work.  Using an automated process it would be hard to ensure specific timeliness are met and to control work.   Having firm management processes would be a better route than automation.

[Austin Adams]

@Brant Schroeder Thank you for your response and I'm happy to hear it is possible. We all 100% agree we need to update the management processes. We are working on this as well but we grew rapidly as a company from 50 to 250 in just a couple of years, and from in-office to a mix of in-office, hybrid, and remote. We've been reeling trying to get everything in order and update things to work best for the new work environment. 

I appreciate the concern as well for the timelines and it's something we are focused on as well but this is monthly recurring tasks typically without a finite deadline other than the end of the month. We have queue managers that can update to make things fit for anything that is time-sensitive. I am hoping this will be a temporary solution as well but we need something in place in the immediate while we work on updating all of the processes and systems to accommodate the vision we have. If we were going to set this automation up, where would the best place to start be between time-based and quantity-based? I am going to look into the other tool as well but in the immediate what would be a basic guideline for setting something like this up be? I typically work through Zapier to make Jira changes but our Director of Ops was told this wasn't possible so I want to give him a starting point to look into this.  

@Ostap Zaishlyi _Reliex_ I also love the idea of this tool and the reporting possible! I will share it with our Director of Ops. I appreciate your concern as well and will reiterate the point above that this is for recurring tasks that are optimizations for our client's sites and not typically time-sensitive. Anything time-sensitive is typically managed outside of this or is able to be worked in by our queue managers. 

Thank you both! And I look forward to your responses. 

[Brant Schroeder]

@Austin Adams I would just create the automation to fire off when the issue is created.  I am assuming that you create the reoccurring issues at the beginning of each month or are you just reassigning them?  Can you explain in a little more detail the steps used for the reoccurring issues?

[Austin Adams]

Yeah absolutely here is the general process outline. As an FYI I may use tasks and issues interchangeably but know they are the same. I may do the same with projects, accounts, and clients. They are all project we just refer to the as clients or accounts.  I did my best to add parenthesis or slashes to notate this but in case I forgot some.

I'll use May tasks as an example:

• The 20th of April I utilize Zapier to automate the new Multitask creation for around 950 clients. The multitask is a parent issue that uses an automation to launch the 14 subtasks to be completed for each project/client each month. We launch at the end of the month because it's typically slower and people will schedule the deliverables out for May while they have the time to do so.
• The assignee and reporter are whoever the account (project) owner.
• The project owner then fills out each sub-issue and reassigns it to their team's queue assignee for sometime in May. Say Team X Creative Queue for this example. It's just an assignee that holds all of the tasks (issues) for each team and the due date is set for when you need the work completed. 
• We have limits on either the number of tasks in a day, or we have a time tracking field for teams who have issues that take between 15-240 minutes so we limit those teams by the time in a given day. This isn't set up in Jira it's just information given to our account leads.
• The queue manager then takes the tasks from the team catch-all (in this case Team X Creative Queue) and reassigns it to the person who will be completing the work. This is typically done at 4:00 PM the day before the due date. Any task that doesn't have the proper information is sent back to the reporter (manually but I'm working on an automation for this) 
• The person on the team (in this example the creative team) who completes the work then utilizes their Jira calendar to complete each issue and uploads the content created from their work back into the task. 
• Once the content is complete they mark the task complete and an email is fired off to the Reporter of the task letting them know it is complete for them to send to the client. Typically the production team also adds a comment so there are multiple emails that are harder to miss.

The issue we are experiencing is even though every person in our company (around 250 people) has access to their team's calendar when multiple people are scheduling at the same time days get overbooked and it's a nightmare trying to manage all of it. I want to put a cap on the days so once a day is full it doesn't allow for any more issues to be added. The limits could be estimated time-based, or a number of issues in a day for a single assignee (like the Team X Creative Queue above). If we can't automatically move it to the next available slot that's okay. It's much less important than capping the assignee's available number of tasks in a single day. Any level of a general outline would be greatly appreciated. I believe we were told it wasn't possible by Atlassian so before trying to do this via API and workarounds I wanted to check the community for anyone who may be able to help. I appreciate any and all recommendations and assistance!