Jira Plans: set team capacity by sprint

A team’s capacity is a number you set once for a sprint. Jira Plans lets you set it, and it compares that number with the work scheduled to the team. This page says how, which edition it needs, what it plans by and where it stops, then what Workline does with the hours of each person. On Atlassian Community the question is asked as “How to do capacity planning in Jira using the premium Plan feature”.

How Jira Plans sets a team’s capacity

• Edition. Capacity in a plan is one of the advanced planning features “only available as part of Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise” (Atlassian, Enable capacity planning in your plan).
• What the plan must be. Work items are estimated in story points or in hours or days; the plan draws its work from boards, because work from spaces or filters will not show capacity; each team in the plan is linked to a board; and team-managed spaces have sprints turned on.
• Turn it on. In View settings, group work items by Team or Sprint, then tick Show capacity on timeline.
• Set a sprint’s number. Select a sprint to open its capacity window, select the number next to Sprint capacity, enter a new value and confirm with the checkmark. It can be changed for active and future sprints (Atlassian, Change iteration capacity from your plan).

What it plans by

The units follow the estimates. With time-based estimates, capacity is in weekly hours and the default is 200 weekly hours. With story points it is points per iteration, and the default is 30. Story points can be chosen “only if all teams in your plan are scrum teams” (Atlassian, Change how work is estimated in your plan).

Where it stops

• Three fields or nothing. To count against an iteration’s capacity, a work item needs a team, a sprint and an estimate. The sprint’s window lists the rest as “work items not assigned to sprint” and “unestimated work items” (Atlassian, How your plan assigns capacity).
• Everyone equal. The plan divides the team’s capacity by its headcount and assumes each person’s capacity is equal; a team of five with 20 points counts as four points each.
• A number you type. A sprint’s capacity is the value you enter. The separate individual capacity view plans on a fixed 40-hour week: “Custom time-tracking or working-day settings are not yet reflected in these plans”, and it takes epic-level work items and above (Atlassian, Plan individual capacity for your team).

With Workline

Workline is our app. It works from the people, not from a number typed per sprint.

• Hours a person can work. Jira’s time tracking settings or Workline’s own, with each person’s part-time hours, holidays for everyone and a person’s time off, set by a Jira admin. A week with a holiday has fewer hours, so the same work shows a higher share.
• Planned hours. The remaining estimates of open work items, spread over their start and due dates, else their sprint’s dates, from today on. Work with neither is Unscheduled.
• In story points too. Where your work items carry story points, Unit switches the plan to points. A person’s pace is the points they finished in the last 6 weeks, or points a week a Jira admin sets.
• A row per person, a column per week, for 4, 8, 12 or 26 weeks, with the share as a lozenge: green to 100%, yellow to 120%, red past it. Filter by Space or Team, a Jira group a Jira admin offers.
• Move hands a work item to someone with room, with everyone’s load before and after.

Workline does not read a plan’s capacity or its teams. It reads work items, sprints and Jira’s own settings. Workline changes nothing in Jira unless you press Move or Apply, and then only the assignee and the due date, or the start and due dates.

See Team capacity per sprint in Jira and Working hours and holidays. Back to Workline.