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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.

For Scrum based board

Step 1: Go to Capacity Tracker

Step 2: Select period and start with configurations

If you have single period (sprint/version) it will be pre selected to get started. If you have multiple periods (sprints/versions) in the board, start with the most recent and active period(sprint/version) configuration.

Step3: Set up appropriate permissions in order to edit configurations.

This step is applicable only if your Jira administrator has enabled Capacity Tracker’s Jira permission control. Please reach out to your Jira administrator in order to get write access.

If Jira permission control is disabled or you already have appropriate permission granted, you will not see an error message and instead you will be able to click on “Edit“ and navigate to configuration page.

Step 4: Add or import users for tracking.

Any users with work allocation in the selected sprint will be detected by Capacity Tracker and will be listed under “View“ option. Alternatively, you can search, select and add users from the add user drop down menu.

View and Import users

Search and Add users

Step 5: Setup member configuration

Once team members are added, you can do following:

  1. Assign role: you can select predefined roles or you can create custom roles and assign.

  2. Define team members working days

  3. Add Days off the team members

  4. Configure their daily capacity. (Note: If capacity type is selected as hours then the daily capacity will be represented as h/day, if capacity type is selected as Story Points then the daily capacity will be represented as Storypoints/day.

Step 6: Setup board configurations.

The board configurations are global configurations for the board. These settings are applied to all periods (sprints/versions) in the project board.

Choose capacity type as per your project needs and working practices. Ensure that they are aligned with your project and team’s estimations practices.

Setup default working days for the entire team according to the company policy.

Add team holidays to account for general unavailability of team members for the selected period.

Save & Close after all configurations are set. You will be redirected to the Capacity Tracker list page.

Step 7: Review the Capacity Tracker details

Check out capacity tracking details. This graphs indicates how much is the work allocation (hours/story points) for the unit availability (hours/story points).

Please ensure Jira’s default time tracking feature is enabled. Estimation fields are configures in your project schemes and screens. Jira’s default Remaining Estimate field is used to estimate and track the remaining work.

NOTE : Following details are going away. I have only kept them for reference here for the time being.

Key summary Steps

Pre-requisite Steps

  1. 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.

  2. Breakdown period stories into sub-tasks.

  3. Estimate them with the Remaining Estimate field into person-hours or person-days. E.g. 3h or 1d

  4. Assign stories and sub-tasks to team members.

  5. Add and configure team members in Capacity Tracker.

Configuration Steps

  1. Import or add users who supposed to work on the period.

  2. 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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  3. Defining roles, this is an optional, but can be useful to view an abstract capacity plan per role or skill level.

  4. Configure days off, public holidays and working days.

  5. Configure public holidays and weekly working days.

  6. 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

  1. View workload bar charts anytime during the Sprint and figure out work allocation issues.

  2. You can drill-down work allocation through expandable bar charts.

  3. You can click on the work items (stories/sub-tasks) and reassign them.

Edge cases and notes

Here are some edge cases that may prevents Capacity Tracker from working as intended and as a result you will not be able to view team capacity and workload bar charts.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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:

SCREENSHOT of Capacity Tracker at Stage 1:

 

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:

  1. Add users through “Manager Users” functionality and configure their capacity, role and days off.

  2. Select and save potential start and end date (duration) of the upcoming sprint in Capacity Tracker.

Outcome:

  1. 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.

  2. 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:

 

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:

  1. Story breakdown into sub-tasks

  2. Estimating sub-tasks into hours or days.

  3. Allocation of stories and sub-tasks to team members.

Outcome:

  1. 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.

  2. 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):

SCREENSHOT2 (Old Jira interface):

SCREENSHOT of Capacity Tracker at stage 3:

 

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