The Inprowiser team contributes to the AGILE community and JIRA users through the development and distribution of useful JIRA add-ons. Capacity Tracker is a simple but most valuable JIRA cloud, server and data center add-on for scrum masters, product owners and SCRUM / Agile or Kanban teams.
The term “capacity” – in the context of project and resourcing – means; the maximum amount of work that a team is capable of completing in a given time period. The Capacity Tracker aims to improve both planning and tracking aspects of the team capacity to help you achieve your iteration(sprint/release version) objectives and project goals with minimal wastage.
We observed that most teams are facing challenges with resource capacity planning, effective work distribution and efficient measurement. Discussions about project planning and project management tend to focus mostly on understanding requirements and creating schedules. These are important, but it is as important to understand that the work of a project is done by people. If we have a fixed set of people available for the project (often, if not always, the case), we need to understand how much work they can achieve without being over or under allocated, in order to understand the scope that can be delivered in a schedule or to estimate a schedule derived from the scope.
How can I know the capacity of each team members throughout the iterations?
How can I account for holidays and leaves while planning for the iterations?
During or after planning, how can I assess who is over-allocated?
How can a I know who has additional bandwidth to take up more work or help other team members?
As a Scrum master or Product Owner, I do not want to overspend time in planning, rather I want to elevate the efficiency and effectiveness of planning by using smart add-ons and tools.
I cannot find any useful work distribution and allocation reports in JIRA
Offline solutions (like excel spreadsheets) are not automatically updated and available globally to my users and become overhead.
Capacity Tracker allows you to configure the availability of your team and enable your team to view, adjust, and track work allocation in accordance to their capacity throughout the iterations (sprint cycles/release versions). The add-on indicates if any assigned members are over-allocated or under-allocated and help to calibrate the work distribution.
It considers the following factors:
Number of team members and their roles (e.g. Developers, Testers, Analysts, etc.)
Length of the iteration (e.g. 2/3 weeks or per custom start and end dates)
Number of workdays in the iteration (default at five days per week e.g. Mon-Fri)
Daily availability of each team member for work. (e.g. X hrs/day or X StoryPoints/day throughout the iteration). It is basically the number of hours a team member is committed to work on a daily basis towards their iteration goals.
Planned time off for each team members in the iteration.
Planned company or public holidays in the iteration.
Total amount of work assigned to each team members, considering only its remaining estimates field. This work could be stories, sub-tasks or bugs.
Size of work (story points) committed and distributed across team members.
Improve visibility on team members’ capacity and work allocation.
Manage team members more effectively and expedite deliveries.
Help Identify risks by regularly monitoring.
Facilitates the decision-making process.
Save time before and during sprint and release version iteration planning.
Please refer following sections of the user manual for the details documentation of Capacity Tracker.
Getting started with Capacity Tracker