Team Workload Management in Jira with ActivityTimeline

As a Manager, you have to make sure that every task is assigned to the right person and that they’re able to complete it by the deadline. You need to make sure that your team can keep up with the workload, but you also want to prevent burnout. But what if your team is working on multiple tasks at once? How do you know who is overloaded and who has too much free time? How to organize a team’s workload management effectively? What if there are some tasks that are overdue because the person who was working on them didn’t have enough time to finish them?

The ActivityTimeline is a great plugin for Jira for visualizing and analyzing team workload. In this blog post, we’ll explain what Workload Management is, how to use the Workload Indicator Mode feature and how you can track your team’s current and future workload with Workload Mode with an example.

What is workload management?

Workload management, also called workload planning, is the process of strategically dividing work across a team to work more efficiently by maximizing the skills and productivity of employees or applications.

Workload planning in Jira is a very dynamic process that should be regularly reviewed. Tracking workload can be exhausting. Workload management is the key moment in work for project managers. There are a lot of pieces to this process, and they all need to be done correctly.

Why Workload Management is important for your Team?

Team workload management is an important aspect of project management. It’s the practice of planning, assigning, and tracking tasks on a team level. It’s important that you complete each of these tasks to get the most accurate picture of your workload for the week. For example, if you don’t calculate how many hours your team has taken off from work on a given day, it will make the time spent at work seem even more daunting.

The benefits of good workload management can include:

●    Improved productivity

●    Improved employee satisfaction

●    Improved employee retention

Best practices for a successful workload planning

●    Prioritize your work according to urgency (or priority). Some things are more urgent than others—ensure that they receive attention first.

●    Determine a time frame. You need to set a due date for all tasks and work on the most important tasks first if possible, but don’t neglect lower priority items either; they still need attention eventually.

●    Estimate your tasks. It’s important to have an estimate for your tasks, otherwise, you’ll never finish anything on time.

●    Consider employee’s work capacity. How to do that you can check in our article about managing team capacity.

●    Plan your work. Make sure all of the tasks in your workload are clearly defined, assigned, and organized so that you can easily see what needs to be done and who is responsible for doing it at any given time.

●    Use a workload planning tool in Jira for better visualization. For better visualization, ActivityTimeline does its best – Workload Indicator on every team member’s timeline, colored indicator, and dynamic calculation. All features help to plan work faster and more productive.

●     Analyze, track and review work. All data from Workload Indicator are easy to review in reports. Regular reviews will help to reduce the risk of burnout. You can also use this data to help identify areas where there may be bottlenecks occurring in a specific project that could cause delays in delivery overall; this helps ensure everything runs smoothly throughout every stage of development.

There are many ways of managing workload effectively—but no matter what method you choose, using Jira with ActivityTimeline can help increase visibility into team member performance so everyone knows exactly how much work there is left to do before deadline day arrives (and how well each person has done in completing their part).

What workload management tool have we created?

To help you with workload tracking, we developed the “Workload Indicator Mode” feature in Activity Timeline. This feature is a workload dashboard that allows you to see immediately how your team’s work stacks up against the ideal balance for each individual member of the team. “Workload Indicator Mode” is created for tracking actual time allocation in your Team.

Here are the most frequent questions that can be interesting to you:

How does Workload Mode work?

Set a “Worklogs and Workload” Mode on the Dashboard. The remaining estimate will be excluded from the timeline in Past days, and you could track only actual tasks.

What tickets are calculated in Workload Indicator?

All estimated tickets will be calculated in Workload Indicator.

How Workload Indicator shows the workload?

The colored indicator shows how many hours a person has been working on an activity per day in relation to what is considered ideal for that person. If it’s green, the person is fully utilized. If the indicator is red, the person is overloaded and cannot take any more tasks for that day.

You can use this information from ActivityTimeline to determine which members of your team might need changes in the schedule.

Does the Workload Indicator include vacations, days off, and holidays in the calculation?

Yes, all vacations, days off, and holidays.

How could it be useful for my planning?

You are not focusing on tasks that are in “Done” status. If the task is logged for a long period and just a little amount of work is done, then a remaining estimate will be pulled upfront to the rest of the future scheduled period.

Here is how it works in ActivityTimeline:

  If a user scheduled work on a task in the past period then the remaining estimate will decrease. You see what is going on with the task in real-time.

Use case:

There is a task for a week with 40 hours of the remaining estimate. Jon doesn’t work on that task on Monday and the remaining estimate is pulled to the next days (Tuesday-Friday).

Then Jon logged 8 hours of work on a task for Monday and the remaining estimate decreased to 32 hours. Logged work is visible on the Dashboard and Indicator too.

Jon worked on Tuesday on another task and logged work to it. We see that time was added to the Dashboard on Wednesday. The remaining estimate of another task was decreased as well.

But Jon still did not finish his task and Indicators signal that he is overloaded: 8h of scheduled work + 8h of logged additional work = 16h of work per day on Tuesday.

The manager is warmed about Jon’s overload. The manager can change the Planned End Date of the task in the Schedule section in the Issue Card or just resize the issue to future days.

Activity Timeline is not only a great way to visualize the workload of your team and find bottlenecks. The feature helps you plan ahead without wasting any time. It’s easy to use and understand. Discover more useful information about ActivityTimeline features, Schedule a Demo, or Start a Free Trial on the Atlassian Marketplace.