Hi Community
I'm evaluating Portfolio for our company.
Actually I'm looking for a tool, that helps us to estimate the time needed to handle a project from start to end.
As there are some projects to be handled in parallel and as the company has many different persons with individual skills, some projects are naturally serialized in some aspects:
- Discuss with Customers, what they actually need by salespersons.
- Hardware has to be build up / bought by persons that know how to build computers.
- Adaption of the hardware to costumers needs are done by adaption specialist.
- Configuring the hardware with special software again software guys.
- Packing and other logistics by again other people.
- Training the Customers by support people.
So, you can see, that there are a lot of different guys needed to handle a project.
Some work blocks other work: there's no sense in training someone without the hardware at hand....
I looked at Portfolio and found that it can help me to schedule the work.
I want to have Portfolio automatically schedule, what work should be done when, so the same person does not have to do different things at the same time: one person can not support two different project for two different customers at the same time...
I see in Portfolio (Version 3.0 new experience and live planning) the 'team' has a central role.
You need a team to have automatic scheduling (Auto-Schedule or Calculate). But the scheduling algorithm is different in new experience vs live planning.
In live planning you can define a team and one or more members of the chosen team to work on an issue. If you choose just one member to do the work then there is an option to automatically assign the issue to this member.
In new experience you can define a team and assign any jira user (that user can be in the team but can also be in any other team or in no team at all) to the issue.
When doing auto scheduling in live planning, the member is not overloaded with work, the estimated time is taken into account, there is no parallel scheduling.
In new experience the assigned person is not relevant for scheduling. Only the teams capacity is relevant. If your team has 3 members working 8h/d and you have 3 issues, each taking 8h, and you assign each work to the exact same person (be it member of the team or not) then the 3 issues are scheduled to be done in parallel. There is no column for dedicating a work to a team member anymore and the assigned user property seems not to be used for capacity thinking.
So I'm confused about what a team should be. In live planning I get the idea, that a team can be a group of workers with different skills (like a team in soccer...): one salesperson, one builder, one adaption specialist, one software guy, one for logistic, one trainer.
Or should the teams group people with same skills: one group of salespersons, one group of trainers, ...
In new experience there is no place anymore to dedicate work to a team member. It seems like a team here is a group of people where the members are interchangeable. So salespersons team, trainers team, software team, ...
And more interesting: the live planning has reports where you can see what each person has to do, or what work a team has to do and a report about capacity....
In new experience there is NO reporting at all... ? Capacities? OK, the scheduling does not take individuals into account anyway.
So long text for two final questions:
- What is the idea what a team is: same skills in one team vs different skills in a team?
- New experience seems to be nice in graphical interaction, when manually moving time targets for issues, but without an capacity reports this more a nice dreaming painting tool...
It looks as a strong reduction of options and usability? Is this intended?
Finally I would like to hear examples of you, how you define your teams in Portfolio?
Sorry for the long text, and thank you for reading up to this point :-)
