Automatic timeline based on priorities and team capacity

[andrey_tyupov]

Hello,

Jira allows creating a timeline based on start dates and end dates, but there is something else that many teams I have seen want, which is not implemented in Jira. I wonder if this is something that is supported by Tempo Structure.Gantt.

Let's say we have a bunch on Epics and we want to draw an approximate timeline for them. We don't have exact start/end dates and we don't want to be constantly updating them, as it is not feasible.

What we know is the following (all captured in Jira issues):

- Estimates (be it story point estimates - that can be translated into mandays of work based on team capacity, actual days, or vague t-shirt size estimates - that can also be translated into days)

- Confidence that we have in the estimates (low, medium, high)

- The dev team that will be working on the epic (it may be multiple teams for each individual story, but for the sake of simplicity let's not dwell into that now)

- Priority (rank, or a score for ordering issues)

Having that info captured in Jira should be sufficient to automatically draw a timeline like this:

It is something that I've seen is currently being done in Excel, but the problem is the manual process is inefficient. If you add another Epic that should come after Epic 1 and before Epic 2, there is a whole lot of manual work to change all the start and end dates. So ideally a user would just click the "Re-generate" button to update the timeline.

Is it something that is currently supported by Structure.Gantt? Or if not, would it be something that Tempo would be interested to implement?

[Stepan Kholodov _Tempo_ · Accepted solution]

Hello @andrey_tyupov 

The best possible solution for the described solution is using the Resource leveling feature. Although it's not a scheduling functionality, as a result, it can give you the chart of the scheduling you need.

If you assign all issues to a single resource and define the Leveling priority attribute in the setting - it will affect the order of how tasks are moved around on the chart - then running the Resource leveling will spread the tasks over time.

Another alternative is to create dependencies between tasks, that are based on links between issues in jira. If all tasks are connected and there is a first task - a task that kicks off the work on the whole project - the tasks will be scheduled according to their estimates and dependencies.

In any case, please reach out to our support portal if you want to discuss it further. We'll be interested in getting to know more about your use-case.

Best regards,
Stepan
Tempo (the Structure app vendor)