How can I share resource availability/work load across plans?

[Craig Day]

We want to use Portfolio accross our enterprise (250 users). There is something I fundamentaly don't understnad in JIRA Portfolio.

My use case is this:

I create a plan for a new product development. The plan includes multiple projects, has different releases, different teams etc. I get everything all scheduled out and sprints are planed and everythign is great.

Then....

Program/Project manager B (not me) comes in and starts making a plan for a new product. She creates all of her tasks, picks projects, releases etc. Then she starts to create teams for people to work on stuff.

At this point it seems basically impossible to determine if a resources is already allocated in another plan. 

Even if you use shared teams the resources will always have 100% of their weekly available hours for the plan you are looking at.

Is this expected? Am I missing something? I suppose if you had one plan for your entire organization it would work but I think there is a limit of the amount of items in a plan @ 5000 which we would exceed. 

Ideally I would think that you would be able to set global weekly hours for people and then as those people's hours are utilzied over plans you can see this when scheduling. If you can't determine who is actually available to work on stuff when you are planning what good is the plan?

I feel like I am missing something... 

[Allard van Helbergen]

Hi @Craig Day, 

This is currently not possible in the way you describe. Shared teams and resources carry over their own availability and skills, etc. but Portfolio does not track if those people are being applied in other plans.

Doing this automatically is undesirable as it would require a lot of assumptions to be made and it would effectively disable anyone from creating an alternate plan on a same project (a usecase that happens very often).

A way to achieve the effect you are looking for, would be to change the working hours and days in your plan settings, or changing the velocity of a team within it. But yes, you will need to check if the base assumptions of your plan hold true; we will never be able to alleviate the need for face-to-face communication. 

I hope that helps.

Cheers,
Allard

[Craig Day]

I understand the workaround and I can understand why it would be undesirable to be limited across plans. Although, I don't quite understand the justification since you can create virtual users. If I am creating a new parallel plan it would seem more effective to create local teams, virtual users, and then start applying real people and making sure they are actaully available. 

Also, with the advent of "scenarios" why would you have parallel or different plans for the same work? It's a lot of overhead setting up a new plan that contains many teams, projects, etc.

What is the most troublesome thing right now is that within a plan I, or any manager, can assign one person to several teams and there is no limit to the hours that the person can work on each team. 40 hours a week on Team A and 60 hours on Team B? during the same time frame Yup Portfolio says its OK. 

So if we, in one plan, have 3 Linux software development teams or if we have product specific teams (which is more the case) if I want one person to work across two teams I have to be very diligent in checking the persons total hours. Otherwise the scheduling is just totally false. 

I would really like to understand how Atlassian uses this tool effectivly with this limitation. 

[Daniel Connolly]

Did you ever get an answer to this?  We are having a similar issue.

[Craig Day]

@Daniel Connolly - Nothing other than the explanation given by @Allard van Helbergen . I even asked when I was at the Summit. 

I still don't understand how you can determine if a plan is accurate if you make a plan and just use what ever resources you want.

Sure you can make different plans for the same projects and go "Hey look at my plan its better". Sure it's better except all your resources and teams are already allocated to other projects that you didn't include.

Just seems odd to me.