Using Advanced Roadmaps for Individual capacity planning

Juan Du Toit
Contributor
March 10, 2021

We have a client that uses AR.

They have teams that constantly change and need to see the individual capacity for current and future projects.

The only way I can think of doing this is by creating individual teams per member.  This would mean creating 80 teams if this gets rolled out to the rest of the organisation.  I don't think it's a good idea as it seems very complicated.

 

Questions:

  • Can this be done using AR if teams are not really working in teams? 
  • What is the best way to do this without hacking AR and overcomplicating it?
  • What alternatives are there?

 

Any inputs will be appreciated.

Regards,

Juan

2 answers

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Dave
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 10, 2021

Hi @Juan Du Toit ,

Thanks for raising this question.... I'm on the Advanced Roadmaps team and I can let you know that this is something that we're looking into in detail at the moment. So although I'm unfortunately not able to give you any great solutions at the moment, any insights you can provide into the various use cases and you and your client's experience would be incredibly valuable.

The workaround that you're suggesting (one person teams) is actually something that we know people do and arguably works but is obviously not an idea solution. We believe that there is a strong appetite for some kind of individual capacity management but there are concerns about providing tooling that might be used against an individual (i.e. saying that person A does more than person B - even though there might be perfectly valid reasons for doing so such as the experience, working hours or contribution across multiple teams).

In order to address team based fluctuations in capacity we have provided a way in which you can adjust the velocity of future sprints (i.e. to account for absences or people joining or leaving a team) but ultimately that relies on the user to actually calculate the velocity to enter.

It would be interesting to understand what types of individual capacity settings are required here, i.e. is this for time or points based capacity, are you looking to account for planned absences (like vacation), increase in capacity over time (to account for individual development), planned secondments into or out of the team, split team contributions (reducing the contribution to each team) or specifically setting the velocity of an individual.

Regards,

Dave

Juan Du Toit
Contributor
March 10, 2021

Hi Dave,

Thanks for getting back to me in such a timely manner! 

Let me work with my client to provide you with more information. Will you be interested in having a call directly with them?

Kind Regards,

Juan

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Dave
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 14, 2021

Hi @Juan Du Toit ,

Sorry it's taken a few days to get back to you on this. I've reached out our Product Management team about your offer, they might respond in time but setting up a call like this is not something that I'd typically be involved in. However, we do appreciate the offer!

Regards,

Dave

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Marius Grigorescu
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April 19, 2021

Hi,

This is a features we are also interested in. We have a reasonable big team and we're trialling Advance Roadmap Planner. Not having the possibility to set individual capacities is one big limitation for us. 
Having teams of one person each can be a temporary workaround, but as you said it not a robust solution.

Thanks,

Marius

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Alex Ortiz
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May 3, 2024

The feature functionality when creating one person Teams to show if an individual is over capacity in their 40hr/week was exactly what I was hoping for, but has one major issue.... Sub-Task "Teams" are then not respected if a Sub-Task is assigned to a different assignee as the "Teams" Field for a Sub-Task is inherited from the parent. 

 

For example:

  • Story 1 (Assignee: Jim, AR Team: Jim)  
    • Sub-Task 1 (Assignee: Jim, AR Team: Jim by default)  
    • Sub-Task 2 (Assignee: Stephanie, AR Team: Jim by default)

This is where the "One Person Teams" will break down, thus not giving you an accurate understanding of Stephanies overall capacity. The Sub-Task will be left out of her "Team: Stephanie" view

 

IMHO, by not providing individual capacity planning, you are inadvertently hurting the individual contributors as PMs aren't able to quickly see if the individual is overloaded when more work comes in. Instead, PMs need to look at the particular week the new work needs to be completed, check the Sprint Capacity Manager view, group by assignee, and calculate the hours themselves to understand if the individual contributor is able to take on more work or if they are already overloaded and need to move work to another IC.

At the bare minimum, estimate hours should rollup to the assignee, so PMs can better help the IC's load balance / set expectations on deliverables to their clients.

When using Teams as designed, you have a different problem. Teams as they are meant to be used doesn't allow you to see individual capacity of those team members as outlined in the original post and many others.

It consolidates the hours together making them interchangeable hours or equal hours amongst the individuals.

For example: Say you have 3 Designers who all work 40 hrs/week... this would mean your Team capacity is 120 hrs/week. Using Teams, George could have 90 hrs assigned to him that week, Stephanie with 10 hrs, and Jim with 20 hrs to which the capacity will show is a perfectly full week (100% capacity). This, however, is problematic given I'd like George to have a life and not have to work overtime to finish his 90 hrs assigned in his 40 hr week.

Why not give Jim & Stephanie some of Georges work then as they seem to have capacity?

That is the fix, but currently advanced roadmaps does not give you an indicator that the single individual within the Team group is obviously overloaded (George for example) so at a glance, the week capacity looks perfect. 

@Dave Please help. Individual capacity empowers teams to help and support each other. Of course the ugly side to this is being able to use this functionality against individuals, but is that the edge case or the use case? Individual capacity is essential and needed to be part of the MVP. 

 

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Tomas Drda
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November 22, 2024

For the love of god, YES!

What @Alex Ortiz said is absolutely true, I do not understand how are you supposed to use the advanced roadmap effectively without being able to track individual capacity of a single person, or the fact that there are developers in each team that specialize only on a specific tasks.

The only solution for this that I found really is creating a team for each person that works on specific type of an issue, at which point, you might as well give us the option to track individual capacity of a person.

 

To reiterate @dave I need to be able to track the capacity of teams and individuals at the same time, on the same view. Just give me the option to treat assignee of the task as a team.

6 votes
Tara L Conklin
Contributor
December 21, 2021

@Dave 

First, I just added my comments and vote to JIRA-20434. We just upgraded to Jira Premium because of Advanced Roadmaps and without the ability to adjust a plan to account for individual PTO, holidays, training etc it seems impossible to create any semblance of an accurate plan. The team capacity is 'set it and forget it' and applies to the entire plan, which is simply not logical. 

How are the teams at Atlassian creating accurate plans in AR? How are you accounting for a team member out due to vacation or unexpected medical issues, or shorted staff due to the holiday season or mandatory training? These are temporary adjustments that need to be accounted for and right now that is simply not possible in Advanced Roadmaps. 

Second, Estimation on AR is only calculated based on days - Estimate (d) - yet unless we don't understand the intended use case of this field it also doesn't allow us to create accurate plan dates based on estimates. We have some teams that plan capacity on hours, some use the Fibonacci sequence for scrum, and another uses a modified scrum sequence. All of these are valid Scrum capacity planning methods and are not supported in the Advanced Roadmaps. 

As another user stated in a different thread, our teams only plan their capacity based on a 6-hour work day. I'm a certified scrum master and coach and best practices always encourage teams to allocate part of their workday to 

 email

 meetings

 unexpected interruptions

 breaks etc

if you plan to an 8-hour workday this inflates the available capacity of the team. 

Advanced Roadmaps also doesn't account for a less than 8-hour per individual capacity. 

This is all essential to accurate and useful planning and I do sincerely encourage your team to incorporate these into AR at your earliest convenience. 

 

(PS: I'd be happy to come to Atlassian to help work on it with you) :0) 😉

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