Is it possible to have different sprint capacity for each sprint?

[Chiranjib B]

The team or availability of team members doesn't stay constant.
If a team member is on leave this week, is it possible to adjust the team capacity only for this sprint?
Expectation would be for the capacity to revert to actual value after sprint. More so, is it possible to connect it with an HR software so that if an employee has applied for leave for some specific day, the capacity automatically reflects in the plan?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

You can, but to do it, you need to edit the settings for each sprint, and that's a) painful and b) throwing off your reporting.

One of the points of Agile is that you cannot assume 100% availability of the team, you need  to adjust to what they can, not what you tell them they should.

It does sound like a bodge, but the easiest thing to do is treat "human away for something" as though it's just another story. 

Imagine a simple Scrum based process you've been doing for a while.  Your team is 7 people (5 developers, a product owner and a scrum master) and over the last few months, the team has consistently been delivering 25 story points of issues every week.

One of your developers, Charlie, books a holiday.  Charlie is going to be away for one week during sprint X, for 5 working days.   

So, you can say that a story of "Charlie needs a holiday" is a valid deliverable.  Create an issue for it, put an estimate of 1/5 of your normal weekly velocity on it, and add it to the sprint.

Having "person not available because <xyz>" as a story really can make it a lot easier to manage agile teams.  It was the first question I asked of the person who first suggested I should read the agile manifesto, and also the answer we got when we asked them.

[Chiranjib B]

This seems like a solution that could work, let me give it a try! Thanks! 

[Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_]

Hi @Chiranjib B 

If you still looking for a solution I would suggest ActivityTimeline - the resource planning plugin with dynamic capacity calculation. ActivityTimeline is presented as timeline dashboard with Workload panel where you can calculate the actual workload, availability, track users worklog, taking into account the weekends, holidays or day-off. Plugin shows capacity by iterations: weekly, by two weeks, monthly, so on. Also you can create booking, with or without calculated hours. 
For HR Software ActivityTimeline supports REST API.

[Chiranjib B]

Thank you, @Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_  for your response.

I'll take a look at ActivityTimeline like you've suggested.

[Nataliya Vasyliv_Reliex_]

If you have any additional questions please feel free to ask me. We can provide a demo session for you if needed. 
Best, Nataliya

[Salem Barhoumi]

Hi @Chiranjib B

thank you for the answer !

Is there a possibility to put those Holiday Stories in separated board from the project board AND then link this separated board to 'associated issue source' in the Teams in jira roadmap. So that we can link two issue source (project source and holiday source) together ?

Or is it possible to create those holiday stories direkt in jira roadmap AND the correspondent (stroy points/capacity) will be added to story points allocated to the correspondent sprint ?

the Goal is that the other team members and stakeholders doesn't get 'confused' with the holiday stories, as we handle them separately (separated boards or just in the roadmap without saving them in jira).

[Chiranjib B]

This is a good idea, definitely we can have two boards, and since each board would have its own filter query, we could even introduce a new Issue Type (Time Off) with a simple workflow of To Do -> Done.

The only downside to this is the admin overhead, since we'd have to get people to apply for leaves in our HR system and then create a Jira ticket in the relevant sprint as well.

[Salem Barhoumi]

@Chiranjib Bthank you. Actually I wanted to ask @Nic Brough -Adaptavist- but your answer was definitely helpful too :).

In some case the HR system is independent from jira tickets (example in projects with different teams in different company). So using two issue sources should work in this case. I will give it a try.

[Florian PEREZ]

Automatically that's seems hard. 

The better I can say to help is Bigpicture maybe have a solution for the holidays. This will help you to know how to plan but you'll have to adpat the sprint manually.

Hope this help ! 

[Anna-BigPicture]

Hi @Chiranjib B

Thank you @Florian PEREZ for mentioning BigPicture. Indeed, the app may solve your issue because it lets you plan stories based on actual resource availability. Moreover, every user can submit his absence in the app what will affect (decrease) the overall team capacity in days of absence.

Let me know if you have more questions. 

[Chiranjib B]

Thank you, @Florian PEREZ & @Anna-BigPicture for your responses.

I'll check it out.