Jira workload pie chart, report and dashboard

Jira has a gadget called Workload Pie Chart, and a report by the same name. Both answer “who has what” with a slice per person. This page says what that chart counts and where it stops, then what a dashboard needs to answer “who is over capacity”. On Atlassian Community the question is asked in the title of a thread: “Why is the Workload Pie Chart showing 0h for tasks with valid time logged?”.

What Jira’s Workload Pie Chart does

• A slice per assignee. Atlassian describes the report as one that “shows the relative workload for assignees of all work items for a space or filter”, and says it is “only available if your Jira administrator has enabled time tracking” (Atlassian, Generate a report).
• It counts time tracking fields. The gadget “relies on fields such as Original estimate, Time spent, and Current estimate”, not Story points, and you point it at a space or a saved filter whose work items carry those fields (Atlassian, Add and customize gadgets).
• A plain pie chart counts work items instead. Atlassian’s Pie Chart gadget shows work items from a space or filter “grouped by a statistic type”, such as Status, Priority or Assignee (Atlassian, Dashboard gadgets).

To put the gadget on a dashboard, open the dashboard, choose Add gadget, and pick it.

Where it stops

A pie chart shows shares of a whole. For capacity that leaves four gaps.

• No capacity. A slice says one person has 40% of the hours in the filter. It does not say how many hours that person can work, so a part-time colleague with a third of the hours looks the same as a full-time one with a third.
• No weeks. The hours are one total. Ten hours due on Friday and ten hours due next month fall into the same slice.
• No sign of too much. A pie is shares of a whole, so it has no line to go past.
• Time tracking only. If your teams plan in story points, the Workload Pie Chart has nothing to count.

The same goes for a dashboard that counts work items by assignee: it counts work items, not hours. For a report with hours by week, you export and build it by hand.

With Workline

Workline is our app. Its plan puts each person’s planned hours against the hours they can work, week by week, and the Workline gadget puts that on a dashboard.

• Add it. On the dashboard choose Add gadget, then pick Workline.
• Per person, per week. It shows each person’s next four weeks as the plan’s lozenges: green to 100% of the hours they can work, yellow to 120%, red past it. Over capacity comes first.
• Your scope. Edit picks the spaces, a saved filter or a JQL search, and a Team if you like. Each person who opens the dashboard counts only the work items they may browse.
• From the estimates. The planned hours are the remaining estimates of open work items, spread over their start and due dates, else their sprint’s dates. Work with neither is in the plan’s Unscheduled column, so a quiet week is never quiet because work went undated.
• To the plan. Open in Workline goes to the plan on the same scope. From there Move hands a work item to someone with room.

Workline does not draw a pie. It draws a row per person against what that person can work, which is the part the pie chart leaves out. 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 Jira workload by assignee for who is over capacity, and Getting started for where the gadget is. Back to Workline.