Resource planning?

[Lieselotte Dirks]

Dear community, has anybody tried to use advanced roadmaps also for resource planning? And if so, what are your tips and tricks/ do's and don'ts?

[Walter Buggenhout]

Hi @Lieselotte Dirks,

Let me start by welcoming you to the Community and wishing you all the best for the new year!

It all depends what you mean by "resource planning". If you think about detailed allocation of work to specific people to assign and forecast workload of individuals, advanced roadmaps is not your best friend.

When the product was still called Portfolio for Jira, version 2.x (still available as live plans, or the "old interface") the tool had individual skills and capacity features built-in. As this brings a lot of overhead to manage all the details for every individual, the tool has moved away from that feature set to focus on team capacity and the goal to plan, monitor and simulate the real objective to deliver a certain scope with a certain team on time. I go back quite some time with the tool myself, and although I've been sceptic about that change at first, from my experience that was a good move.

Very often focussing too much on individual planning tends to hold back the growth path of an organisation. Whereas focussing on managing the same work as a team exposes bottlenecks, which often uncovers opportunities to solve those problems together and moving forward. Obviously, that requires a lot more than just a tool to make certain things transparent: a certain organisational culture, an (agile) mindset with a focus on continuous improvement and collaboration, a certain autonomy and alignment of your people and teams, ...

As every company has its own way of doing things, I still see several with a strong focus on the people first and their team's objectives or desired outcomes later on. Or some are forced into that due to the nature of their work (e.g. when they work for customers on specific dates). If that's what you need, other tools are probably better suited to support you. On several occasions, we've helped organisations with Tempo planner (as a replacement or side-by-side with advanced roadmaps) to cover that need. Or the Atlassian marketplace has plenty of tooling options on offer.

As a wrap up: when talking about resource planning, tooling is just a small piece in the entire puzzle. How you work - and more importantly why you work the way you work - is essential in helping you find the best supporting toolset to fit your needs. It's always a good idea to talk to a solutions partner to help you work this out, starting from those needs and combining that with their knowledge of available tools out there.

kr,

Walter

[Isger Neel]

Hi @Lieselotte Dirks

If mean ‘people’ under ‘resources’, then you can try AcitivityTimeline. We’ve been using app for half a year, and it was really good so far.

[Tom Ng]

I would recommend a new app in the marketplace TeamBoard Team Resource for Team management and TeamBoard Project Resource for projects and program, it has morden design and rich features. You can also request new features and the team react quickly.

Note: I am working for DevSamurai the maker of the app so my answer maybe biased