Jira capacity planning: who has time, by week
Jira Cloud, work items and time tracking.
Capacity planning answers one question: does the work fit the people? In Jira that means putting each person’s hours of work against the hours they can work, week by week. This page says what Jira shows by itself, then what Workline adds.
What Jira does by itself
Jira holds the ingredients. A work item can carry an Original estimate, a Remaining estimate and Time spent, and it has an assignee, often a start date, a due date and a sprint. A search finds what a person has open:
assignee = currentUser() AND statusCategory != Done ORDER BY duedate
Add the time tracking columns to the results and you can total a person’s remaining estimate. What Jira does not do by itself is put those hours in weeks. A total of 60 hours says nothing until you know whether it is due in one week or in four, and what that person can work in them: Jira’s time tracking settings give one site-wide working day and week, with nothing for a holiday or a part-time colleague. Most teams do the sum in a spreadsheet, once, and it is out of date by the next sprint.
What Workline does
Workline is our app. It does that sum from Jira itself, and does it again each time you open the plan. Apps › Workline shows one row per person and one column per week, for 4, 8, 12 or 26 weeks. Each cell is the hours planned for that person that week, with the share of the hours they can work as a lozenge: green to 100%, yellow to 120%, red past it.
The planned hours are the remaining estimates of open work items, or the original estimate less what was logged when Jira has no remaining one. They are spread over each work item’s start and due dates, else its sprint’s dates, from today on. A work item with neither is shown as Unscheduled, never guessed into a week, and one past its due date is planned for today and marked Late.
The hours a person can work come from Jira’s time tracking settings, or from Workline’s own, with part-time hours, holidays and time off set by a Jira admin. Above the table, the counts say how many people are over capacity and how many have time free.
Not everything has an estimate. Book time sets aside part of a person’s week for onboarding or support, and a placeholder is a row for a hire you have not made. When someone is over and someone else has room, Move hands a work item over, with everyone’s load shown before and after. Workline changes nothing in Jira unless you press Move or Apply (on dates for work with none), and then only the assignee and the due date, or the start and due dates, as you.
Read how each figure is made in The plan. To see one person’s work item by work item, read Jira resource planning by person. See Book time and Move work. Back to Workline.
