The Importance and Benefits of Capacity Planning
“We just don’t have the bandwidth!”
Have you ever been knee-deep in a project, you and your colleagues heads down feeling like you’re all maxed out with nothing left to give? Or you’re halfway through a task only to realize one of your co-workers will be on leave for the next two weeks leaving only you to wrap up all the work? Situations like these can become the exception rather than the norm when you take the time before actual work begins by matching the anticipated capacity of everyone involved with the workload that needs to be completed.
This in essence is Jira capacity planning. Days or even a week or more out from the start of the next round of work, you gather as a team, review the scope of the project, and pair it against the capacity of everyone involved. This includes not just working hours, but more importantly what percentage of their time can be dedicated to work in the upcoming iteration. Also be sure to include, or rather exclude, availabilities based on days out of the office such as holidays.
You’ll quickly realize a handful of benefits by implementing iteration or sprint capacity planning with your teams. Probably the paramount reason is to prevent not only missing deadlines but also levels of burnout and fatigue among your staff. As time progresses, budgeting for costs and ensuring the proper allocation of resources will become second nature. You’ll add a level of transparency that may not have been previously present; each team member will have insights into who is working on what, and when each element is anticipated to be completed. Finally, for both the short and the long term, you’ll help ensure an optimized planning process for all involved.
Five Steps to Better Capacity Planning in Jira
Jira isn’t just a powerful tool for those tech-heavy teams engaged in product development, although it certainly is that. It can also be wholly appropriate for those teams involved in say less technical pursuits, such as marketing, event planning, and everything in between.
Jira has a wide variety of project templates to build from
We wanted to offer a few steps you might want to integrate into your workflow specific to Jira capacity planning in Jira:
- Schedule a team meeting and create pre-work
- “Hindsight is 20/20”
- Put it all on the table
- Use that simple math
- Go forth boldly
Schedule a Team Meeting and Create Pre-work
We get it, not many (any?) of us enjoyed homework growing up, however in this case, when a little homework makes your life and that of your colleagues measurably simpler and more efficient for the next few weeks, it’ll make the medicine a bit easier to swallow. Schedule a meeting with all teams and their respective members to plan the individual and combined capacity for your upcoming iteration.
And rather than spending the first portion of that meeting with everyone trying to determine their capacity for the iteration, have them do so ahead of time. This should include all of their typical work-related tasks in a given week – any and everything that will occupy their time for the upcoming iteration. Again, this will also include the time they might be away for holidays and vacations.
Hindsight is 20/20
“Hindsight is 20/20” as the saying goes. One of the best ways to plan for the future is to look to the past, and more specifically, what worked and what didn’t. Retrospectives, or “retros”, held very soon after the completion of an iteration are a great way to have an honest conversation with all teams and team members identifying and recognizing not only wins, but instances where timelines and capacities may have been pushed near or over the line. Once you’ve identified the “what”, you can further flesh out the “why” to help avoid it happening again!
Put It All on the Table
By this we simply mean when you and your colleagues do meet, be transparent and honest given what you discover is available capacity wise. Additionally, knowledge and experience gaps can be identified ahead of time so if you’ll need outside assistance from a team or department not typically involved with your iterations, best to make those arrangements now versus when you realize it’s too late. It’s also possible that additional training may need to happen for one or more of your teams beforehand. And if either option isn’t available before getting started, you’ll want to modify the scope to accommodate the situation.
Use That Simple Math
Don’t fret, we’re not talking quadratic formula or computing the area of a trapezoid, we’re talking some basic math. Assuming everyone did their homework ahead of time, when you gather you can drop everyone’s respective numbers into a spreadsheet. Again, all that’s needed from everyone is how much time can be dedicated to the iteration’s work, and the number of days out of office if any.
Creating a capacity calculator for your team is quick and easy
For each iteration, count up the number of working days available and for each team member take out the number of days they’ll be out and from what remains, multiply that number against what percentage they said they can dedicate to the iteration. You’ll see individually their calculated capacity for the iteration or sprint and you can sum all those values together to get the team’s combined capacity calculation.
Congratulations Einstein, you now know what you have to work with capacity-wise. This will give you the measure to compare against the work being planned for the iteration to determine if it’s realistic or not and where adjustments may need to be made. You can take our example a step further by grouping roles that are similar in nature (e.g. sales or content) and add a grouped calculation for each to identify for instance how much capacity your QA team has available.
Go Forth Boldly
The picture should now be much clearer of how your iterations will be planned out. Matching capacity, along with everyone’s respective skills – and if outside help will be required – will create alignment with tasks and goals. It’s now much easier to determine even before diving into the work, what is and isn’t possible to be achieved. You’ll be saving yourself and your colleagues headaches and undue stress down the road.
Managing Capacity (And More) with Agile Hive
So we’ve seen a basic example of how something as simple as an Excel or Google spreadsheet can help with your Jira capacity planning, but what about the tools inside of Jira itself where all your tickets and work will actually be tracked and documented?
Jira is a powerful tool for issue and bug tracking, as well as agile project management, essentially breaking down projects into smaller tasks and organizing them. Out of the box, however, giving you the ability to visualize resources and manage capacity requires additional tooling. If you simply need to extend or enhance Jira’s capacity planning, there are a number of plugins for that. Jira’s own Work Management and Advanced Roadmaps products, which were created to address these needs, were retooled and rolled into Jira Plans.
Jira Plans
Suppose you need to integrate Jira capacity planning into your entire workflow at the Agile Release Train (ART) level. In that case, many of your other needs such as PI planning, effectively visualizing and managing dependencies, reporting, and many others will go unmet. This is where Agile Hive, the “SAFe® in Jira” solution can bridge the gaps. Agile Hive significantly extends Jira’s base capabilities, most especially with larger-scale agile frameworks such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®).
Whether you’re using story points or working hours within Jira, Agile Hive acts as the “single source of truth” consolidating all your efforts within one tool with extended insights into resource utilization and coordinating the work and cross-team dependencies. A great example is during PI Planning of an ART, where alignment occurs between development plans and the overall business goals. Once capacities have been calculated within each team respectively during breakout sessions and drafts have been made of work for the next iteration, PI objectives are then shared with the entire ART for review and feedback.
Agile Hive for Jira Cloud and its Team Planning Board, enabling PI planning, dependency management
along with capacity planning, backlog management, and more
Business values are then assigned, the ART planning board is developed identifying forecasted delivery dates, any dependencies internal to or between teams, and highlighting milestones. The end goal of the PI planning event is to have alignment and agreement between business owners and the teams involved as to the PI’s goals. Reporting widgets at the ART and team levels identify in real-time, key indicators such as velocity, story points burned, load vs. capacity, risks, objectives, and more.
Agile Hive for Data Center, Team Reports
Agile Hive’s adherence to SAFe® principles provides this start-to-finish, over-arching solution from planning to implementation and finally to successful completion.
Your Next Step in Capacity Planning and Beyond
We’ve taken a look at the importance of capacity planning, how to implement it within your workflow, and how Agile Hive extends Jira capacity planning as a key element in an agile framework. Enhancing your overall experience in Jira, Agile Hive extends the base capabilities providing additional tooling for managing multiple teams and projects, both simple and complex.
If Jira capacity planning has been on your radar and you’re seeking additional guidance, or it’s part of a broader effort on your part to transform your teams into an agile, highly productive organization, we’d love to speak with you when you’re ready. Reach out to us to schedule an appointment to chat about your organization’s needs, to book a demo, or to set up your test instance of Agile Hive. We look forward to partnering with you!
