Resource management; taking temporal changes into account using improved interface

[rberkel]

Hi,

We are currently evaluating Portfolio for Jira, we are still in doubt whether or not to buy a license or not. One of the things that is keeping us from buying a license right now is basically the following open question: how to deal with temporal changes in team capacity using the "improved interface". E.g. I have a team of 4 developers, 1 developer has a holiday period of 4 weeks, this means the team will have a reduced velocity for four weeks. How can we make Portfolio take this into account? Similar use case: what if we want to add a resource for just 8 weeks to see what the effect is on the planning?

Thanks in advance.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @rberkel

Thank you for reaching out.

Per your description, you want to know how you can configure your team individual working days/hours, considering holidays and temporary resources in your capacity. Is that correct?

Basically, there are two types of availability to consider in Portfolio for Jira:

• Global availability, which defines the working hours and dates of each person across all the teams the person belongs to.

• Team availability, which defines the working hours and dates of a person in a particular team.

These would be the exact steps to configure the availability of specific persons across teams: 

1. Ensure that the Shared Team Management permission has been granted in the Portfolio Global Permissions. 
2. Select the person you want to configure by going to the Team view > select a team member and click Manage next to global availability or:
   
   • Go to Portfolio > Manage Shared Teams > People, select a team and a team member.
   • Fill in the Global availability fields:

Start date	Start date at which the person is available to work. Example: The date they join the company.
End date	End date at which the person stops working. Example: Date their contract expires.
Absences	Dates ranges the person doesn't work. Example: Holidays, sick leave or parent leave.

For more information about the steps provided, you can check the documentation below:

- Configuring the availability of team members 

Let us know if you have any questions.

[rberkel]

Hi @Petter Gonçalves thank you for your answer. 

I think you missed one thing I mentioned, which is "using the improved interface". What you are suggesting is not supported when using the improved interface, see screenshot below. The note is only mentioning global and team availability not to be supported, therefor I also tried setting absences, but this does not work either.

[Petter Gonçalves]

Hello @rberkel

I apologize for missing your mention of the "new improved interface".

Indeed, I can confirm to you that the new Improved interface of Portfolio does not consider Individual capacity planning. As mentioned by Roi in this feature request:

The approach for capacity planning in the new UI is more lightweight.

We are constantly building more features in this area. But are our main focus at the moment is to build more features around the team capacity and/or ** velocity, rather than individuals'.  

Portfolio's mission is to be the "team of teams" agile planning tool. To drive that first, we need to surface teams' velocities and allow effective what-if scenario planning based on those.

If that approach doesn't work, I'd love to hear why, and remind you that you can always switch to the old interface.

That being said, we strongly recommend you to vote and watch the suggestion to increase its priority and also receive notifications about any updates. Also, feel free to provide your scenario in the feature request to get the feedback from other users and developers on how they managed to achieve it using the new UI.

Let us know if you have any questions.

[Roi Fine]

Hi @rberkel

We are working on a new feature that would allow you to adjust your future velocity per sprint to accommodate such cases. 

Please stay tuned, it would be available soon.

Cheers,

Roi | Product Manager - Portfolio for Jira

[rberkel]

Hi @Roi Fine, thank you for your answer. 

Sounds promising, but this leaves me with two questions:

1. What is the planned release date? Which quarter of this year can we expect it?
2. Is there a work-around you can advise which we can use until the feature is released?

Thank you very much in advance.

Greetz,

Richard.