After successful installation, you will be able to see “Capacity Tracker” icon on the left-hand side panel in JIRA. Please refer following step by step guide to start working with Capacity Tracker.
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If users are not configured for the sprint. You will need to add users to plan their capacity.
If your sprint is blank/empty. i.e. You don’t have any stories or sub-tasks in it.
If you have not allocated the stories and sub-tasks to team members.
If you have not used the remaining estimate field to estimate the stories and sub-tasks of your project while your capacity type configured for hours based tracking.
If you have not used the default story points to size the stories of your project while your capacity type is configured for story points based tracking.
If you are working on a future period, but you haven’t configured start and end date.
If you are using custom fields for estimations.
NOTE : Following details are going away. I have only kept them for reference here for the time being.
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Key summary Steps
Pre-requisite Steps
The basic unit of all measurements and presentation in Capacity Tracker is the person-hours, it is essential that users have time tracking on and tasks are estimated.
Breakdown period stories into sub-tasks.
Estimate them with the Remaining Estimate field into person-hours or person-days. E.g. 3h or 1d
Assign stories and sub-tasks to team members.
Add and configure team members in Capacity Tracker.
Configuration Steps
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Import or add users who supposed to work on the period.
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Configure team members’ daily capacity. Most teams consider 6 to 7 hours as daily capacity, instead of 8 hours. This allow teams to discount the time spent on daily meetings, team discussions, and other non-productive hours. This is however up to users/teams to decide how many hours they want to configure as daily capacity for their project. In another example let’s say you have a team member who is only 50% available during the period and/or shared with another team. You can configure his capacity as 3-4 hours in order to indicate he is available partially.
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Defining roles, this is an optional, but can be useful to view an abstract capacity plan per role or skill level.
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Configure days off, public holidays and working days.
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Set period start and end date for the future period. You don’t need to set this up for the current period as it refers it from the JIRA’s actual period dates.
Tracking Steps
View workload bar charts anytime during the Sprint and figure out work allocation issues.
You can drill-down work allocation through expandable bar charts.
You can click on the work items (stories/sub-tasks) and reassign them.
Operational workflow and stage instructions
Stage 1: Beginning
You may have a blank period at the beginning. There are no stories or tasks planned yet, and user are not configured.
SCREENSHOT of backlog at Stage 1:
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SCREENSHOT of Capacity Tracker at Stage 1:
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Stage 2: Configuration
Still you haven’t planned any stories or tasks for the period, but you want to have an overview of team capacity.
Inputs/Recommended steps:
Add users through “Manager Users” functionality and configure their capacity, role and days off.
Select and save potential start and end date (duration) of the upcoming sprint in Capacity Tracker.
Outcome:
You will be able to view total team capacity (in person-hours) as well as you will be able to view capacity per role and for individual team members.
However, since the task remaining estimate field isn’t filled and allocations are due; it won’t show you work distribution.
SCREENSHOT of Capacity Tracker at Stage 2:
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Stage 3: Planning
At this point, you have a rough capacity plan for your team. Teams usually work out story/task breakdown, estimation and work allocation during the sprint planning process. They can conduct these steps in any order. Also, it is not necessary to begin with stage 3 only after stage 2. Their order can be switched or executed in parallel. Users can start the sprint in JIRA with actual start and end date.
Inputs/Recommended steps:
Story breakdown into sub-tasks
Estimating sub-tasks into hours or days.
Allocation of stories and sub-tasks to team members.
Outcome:
Workload bar charts: Team can see the current capacity and work distribution across team members. This allow teams to calibrate and adjust work distribution for the optimal efficiency and outcome. Team can avoid situations where some team members are over or under.
a. RED bar chart indicates over-allocation or schedule slippage.
b. GREEN bar chart indicates work on track or free team capacity/bandwidth.Users can review capacity planner during sprint, monitor progress, identify risks, and resolve proactively.
Following are the SCREENSHOTS of sample sub-tasks, estimation and allocation.
SCREENSHOT1 (New Jira interface):
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SCREENSHOT2 (Old Jira interface):
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SCREENSHOT of Capacity Tracker at stage 3:
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