Intro to Jira Plans | Team Capacity Planning

Quick Overview

Jira Plans enables team capacity planning by allowing users to visualize, manage, and optimize team workload across multiple iterations using story points or hours, ensuring informed adjustments to work assignments to keep projects on track.

Key Points: Jira Plans facilitates team capacity planning to identify when teams are over or under capacity across multiple iterations (0:17). Capacity can be estimated using either Story Points or Hours, with the default being Story Points (2:24). Team capacity configuration involves setting sprint length (e.g., 2 weeks) and capacity in weekly hours (e.g., Mobile App team set to 100 hours/week) (1:50, 1:46). The Capacity View in the Timeline tab visually displays sprint capacity information, showing allocated hours versus capacity (3:36). When grouping by Team in the View Settings, Jira Plans automatically displays capacity on the timeline, showing status like 149/360 hours allocated (3:37, 5:55). Users can adjust work assignments by editing estimates in the Timeline view or by moving work items to future sprints/iterations as needed (5:24, 5:46). The capacity view helps teams make informed decisions to prioritize and schedule work items to meet deadlines (0:50, 5:04).

Context: This video tutorial, presented by Irene Ongkowidjaja, a Principal Product Manager for Jira at Atlassian, introduces the Team Capacity Planning feature within Jira Plans. The context is demonstrating how to use Jira Plans to gain an aggregated view of work spanning multiple teams and iterations, enabling managers to proactively manage workload and avoid bottlenecks or underutilization.

Detailed Analysis

The video explains that Jira Plans offers a feature for team capacity planning to help visualize and optimize team workload across multiple iterations, allowing for informed decisions on work assignments. To set this up, users first create a plan, linking existing Jira boards as work sources (1:13). Next, team capacities and sprint lengths are configured in the Teams tab, where default capacities (e.g., 200 weekly hours for most teams) can be overridden based on team size (1:42). For the Mobile App team, capacity was reduced from 200 to 100 weekly hours due to having fewer members (1:57). Estimation can be set to Story Points or Hours in the Plan Settings under Estimation and Scheduling (2:24). When viewing the Timeline, selecting the 'Capacity View' groups work by Team or Sprint and displays capacity utilization directly on the sprint bars (2:31, 5:55). For example, in 'GIVE Sprint 1', 149 out of 360 hours were allocated (41% full) (3:36). If a sprint is over capacity (e.g., 378/360 hours allocated for 'GIVE Sprint 2'), users can adjust estimates or move work items to future sprints to rebalance the load and keep projects on track (4:23, 5:44). The capacity view provides a crucial overview for managing workload distribution.