Jira Sprint Planning: How to Manage Team’s Capacity?

Agile teams know that a well-planned sprint can bring great results and save precious time, ensuring teams stay on track and deliver results effectively. However, managing team capacity within this framework is equally essential to achieve success. Lots of teams use Jira Software for planning and managing their projects. Moreover, Jira integrates with add-ons that allow to expand opportunities and simplify the planning process. In this article, we’ll discover the main Jira features that can help to plan sprints, manage teams’ capacity, and run projects smoothly.

Jira for Agile Teams: Sprint Planning

Jira was developed as a project management and task planning platform for teams of any type and size. Users can create multiple projects (from development to business ones), track tasks, create reports, and communicate via the platform.

Jira Software was created especially for development teams, so it contains all the features needed for teams who stick to agile principles. It provides special shared boards (Scrum and Kanban) for every project, where users can create, prioritize, and track tasks (issues, epics, stories, and bugs), manage sprints, and collaborate effortlessly.

Our main focus is on the Scrum Boards, as they allow to create sprints. Scrum is a framework for iterative and incremental product development, emphasizing flexibility, communication, and continuous improvement. It divides work into small, manageable units called “sprints,” typically lasting two to four weeks, during which teams aim to deliver a potentially shippable product increment.

Scrum Boards in Jira Software serve as virtual workspaces where teams can visualize and manage their tasks throughout the sprint cycle.

Project Managers can simply manage the current sprint, or create as many sprints as needed, track the task progress, and make sure that all issues are estimated, assigned, and completed. Jira supports estimation in both hours and story points, which is very helpful for agile planning. Plus, this platform includes time-tracking features, so each team member can log worked hours.

Sometimes Managers face challenges with resource management and workload balancing. However, as we previously mentioned, Jira integrates with plugins, so teams can advance their planning possibilities and sprint planning. Users can find various tools in the Atlassian Marketplace and try them.

For example, ActivityTimeline for Jira is a resource planning app that facilitates resource capacity management, includes time tracking and reporting features, and is highly useful during sprint planning. Let’s dive deeper.

ActivityTimeline: Resource Planning and Tracking

The app’s Main Dashboard is built like a calendar that contains all Jira projects with tasks. Users receive a cross-project view for shared resources in a single place. In addition, it provides visual team and user timelines that help to plan capacity and tasks for different scopes:

It also supports task estimation in hours and story points and allows to log and track user time. The tool is fully synchronized with Jira so information is always up to date, and users can be sure that no part of the project is missing.

Managing Sprint Capacity with ActivityTimeline: Key Points

ActivityTimeline can make capacity planning for sprints effortless. Here are 5 main points to support this opinion:

1. Workload and Availability Management

Each user and team timeline provides special workload indicators that can show workload, availability, or issues per day for the chosen timeframe. It helps to prevent work under or overload and track the number of work hours. The app also allows to assign users different work schedules and workload schemes. The team timeline indicators can show workload in hours or percentages:

2. Team Panel

This special panel offers the capability to combine or divide team and individual timelines, granting considerable adaptability in organizing tasks and planning. It stands out in illustrating every phase of the process meticulously and facilitates task delegation to teams rather than individuals.

Utilizing the team panel simplifies the management of tasks for both teams and individual users. This is achieved by opting for a unified view, enabling planning for future sprints across various levels and timeframes.

3. Holiday Management

The app incorporates functionalities for overseeing holidays and personalized events, encompassing sick leave, days off, holidays, bookings, placeholders, overtime, and additional options. It’s a very useful feature as it allows Managers to understand the whole work schedule of the team members:

4. Timesheet Tracking

Users can track worked hours with timesheet templates. There are various types: Team, User, and Epic Timesheets. You can add Jira filters and customize them in a few clicks:

5. Resource Reports & Charts

The app also provides various reports and charts to facilitate resource allocation and monitoring throughout sprint planning.

You can find more about sprint planning in Jira with ActivityTimeline in the following video:

Check out our Blog for resource planning tips and schedule a Free Demo to get additional information about ActivityTimeline features.

FAQs

What does sprint planning in Jira entail?

It involves selecting and prioritizing tasks from the backlog and assigning them to team members based on their capacity. Scrum Boards in Jira allow to create sprints and manage them. Teams also use different integrations for Jira, like ActivityTimeline, to advance their sprint capacity planning.

How to plan sprint in Jira?

Jira Software provides Scrum Boards that allow to create and manage sprints. Users can also try special add-ons for Jira, like ActivityTimeline, to enhance their planning.