Why does Portfolio for Jira not use all my team members to equal capacity

[Fiona McCrossan]

I have created a plan and have a team of 2 working on it. It is set up as a Kanban plan however for some reason Portfolio is assigning one team member at full 100% capacity for the project but only assigning the other at 78%. 

How and why is it deciding this and how can I change it so the stories are split more evenly across the 2 ? 

Thanks,

Fiona

[Thomas · Accepted solution]

Hi @Fiona McCrossan,

There are a few reasons for this behavior, the most common is that Portfolio tries to schedule pieces of work to be done by the same person when possible. Having 3 people working on a 2 hours task is usually not beneficial unless different skills are needed.

Another thing to note is that Portfolio prefers to highlight that "you have planned work for 4 people and 5 are available" rather than "You are a little under capacity for 5".

Finally Portfolio will try to fill everyone's available capacity before jumping to next unit (day or sprint) which means usually only the last unit is impacted by this behavior or unit that are under capacity.

I understand this is a choice that may not fit everybody so I created a suggestion here: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JPOSERVER-2252

As a workaround for now you could consider manually setting the team member for a few of those stories to even things out or to reduce the overall team capacity to ensure they are never at full capacity to handle the unexpected.

Cheers,

Thomas

[Fiona McCrossan]

Thanks Thomas. 

Yes I noticed that when I added in more team members the 2nd team member was then used more. It seems like Portfolio is trying to allocate overall at 90% capacity but instead of doing that across the team members equally it does it over the first couple of team members and always makes the last team member the least used.

It would be a useful feature if Portfolio allowed the option to set what % utilisation for the team or even better for each team member.

[Ben Emerson]

Hi @Thomas, I've found the same issue. However, when I found this issue there were a number of minor differences:

1) The capacity for two team members ('a' and 'b') with the same skills was identical for sprints 1-4, then the rest of the issues in the portfolio were assigned only to team member 'a' for sprints 5-8.

2) Additionally, for sprint 5 for team member 'a' their capacity is at 21% whilst their remaining sprints 6-8 and initial sprints 1-4 they are nearly at full capacity.

Screen shots attached.

[Thomas]

Hi @Ben Emerson,

This might be a little more complicated to guess from screenshots but here are some possible solutions:

If you are using skills, it's possible that only one person has the necessary skills to complete those tasks.

Those issues could also be manually assigned to those users in Jira and Portfolio would then try to respect that.

If this is not the case I'd advise getting that question to support so that you can share more detailed information safely.

Cheers,

Thomas