Reserving Resource Capacity in Big Picture

[Deleted user]

Hi Forum,

We have a challenge that I hope some smart cookie can help us with.

We are using Big Picture Enterprise to help us manage our resources across our portfolio.

The portfolio consists of waterfall and agile projects. We seem to have resource management sorted out for the waterfall projects but don't know how to proceed with the agile project teams.

These teams don't have any tasks assigned to their members beyond the existing sprint. The danger then being that other tasks will be assigned to them as the appear to have bandwidth available.

Is there a way to reserve their bandwidth for future sprint tasks?

[Anna-BigPicture]

Hi @[deleted]

If your Team has no tasks assigned in future sprints and your aim is to book their capacity, I recommend you to use a Basic Task as a placeholder. 

Basic tasks are tasks stored by the App and are not synchronized with Jira or other connected tools. 

You invoke basic tasks with the “+” button in the top-left corner of the Gantt module. See my image as a reference. 

When you switch to the Resources module, the Basic task will be nested in swimlane "Unassigned." You can drag it to any Agile Team Member and subsequently add Time Estimates in Manual Contouring mode to book a team member's availability. 

Please let me know if you have further questions. 

[Deleted user]

Thanks @Anna-BigPicture for the suggestion but we have about 12 agile teams with an average of 7 people per team.

It would just take too much time to create a basic task for each person and then manually contour their availability per day for the rest of the year.

It would be easier to have some kind of team based resource reservation.