Manage Team Capacity in Jira with Activity Timeline Reports

It is important for a project manager to be aware of how things are going in the project and to be able to take appropriate corrective actions when it is needed. However, keeping up with each and every team member and track team capacity is a time-consuming process, and sometimes a lot of significant information for the manager: person’s workload, team workload, a total number of hours planned per each project, an amount of logged work, etc — can be lost.

What is Team Capacity?

Team Capacity is the maximum amount of work that can be completed within a given time frame and it relies on how many hours a group has available to complete that work.

There are a number of advantages to using capacity. Better resource management and the completion time for a project can be fairly estimated in advance.

How to calculate Team Capacity?

Before planning you need to know the next data:p

• Iteration period
• Number of workdays in this period
• Number of Team members
• Meetings or another project’s activity when the person will not be involved in the work
• Planned days-off, vacations or holidays for every member

Let’s see how to calculate Team Capacity. For example, your team has one week Sprint. It’s 5 working days, 40 hours per week. Every day team has 2 meeting, it’s 10 hours per week. Your team members have 3 employees: first members has availability 40 hours, second member has availability 32 hours, third member has availability 28 hours.

Team Capacity = (40+32+28)-10. 90 person-hours are available for the whole team.

Capacity Planning for Teams in Jira

For starting a planning, you need to operate with a time iteration: by week, by two weeks or by month. If you are a Scrum team it is a Sprint. In the planning meeting (Sprint planning), the product owner and team members determine how much work can be done in a single sprint. Capacity is determined by either a percentage of time or a number of story points. When you represent team capacity in the timeline, Workload Panel will display and bring attention to how work is distributed across weeks or Sprint time periods.

Jira mainly concentrates on projects and tasks. Jira has a variety of reporting plugins that can help you manage your resources more effectively.

In order to make these processes easier, we included a Reports features to Activity Timeline, which will help them keep a check of all these things without putting in much time or effort.

Team Capacity Reports with ActivityTimeline

To give you a quick overview of what we’ll go through in this post, here are the three types of reports for teams we will tell you about:

1. Planning Reports

2. Time Sheets Reports

3. Tracking Reports

Planning Reports

These reports display planned workload based on Remaining Time Estimate of scheduled Jira tasks and custom events. There are reports type available: workload for each employee, per team and project, their respective summary variants. Extra reports display the availability of people in particular teams or positions (per skills) at a point in time.

Team Utilization Report – this type of report will help you to make sure that your team members are scheduled to work on the project so that they can use their full capacity. You can check available capacity, utilized capacity for the team. ActivityTimeline automatically calculate the utilization rate for every team.

Availability Reports – a set of reports display availability of people per particular team, skill or employee position in the future. Green color corresponds to full utilization. Negative numbers show overloaded periods.

Time Sheets Reports 

Time Sheets Reports— a set of reports generated based on the amount of work done (number of hours logged by people in a team). ActivityTimeline allows to include bookings or non-working days in calculation.

What does it include:

Team Summary Work Log Report lets you know the amount of logged work during the course of a particular period of a month and also the person logged into the work.

Team Detailed by Issue Work Log Report — shows Jira tickets, in which amount of work done was logged for those tickets.

Team Detailed by Project Work Log Report brings into being a report on which projects the work logged for, against time.

Tracking Reports 

Tracking Reports — a set of reports generated based on the time planned and time spent on specific Jira tickets for a defined period of time, and time off.

Why it is useful for PM:

Issues Progress Report or Project Progress Report builds a summary of Jira tickets, time estimates (original and remaining), time spent already on the tickets, and ticket status. A report represents the collected data about Jira tickets, a person who was the last assignee, Start and End Dates, Original and Remaining Estimates, Time Spent (logged work), Issue Summary and Status. In this report you can set a deviation percentage that are acceptable. Report displays the status for every project: is a project overloaded, underloaded or the project are perfectly estimated.

Planned vs Logged by Team – it’s an excel report where you can compare your planned workload with actual logged hours.

Vacation Report gives information about vacations, days off, sick leaves, and holidays per each team member.

How to Use Reports for Team Capacity

In every report, you can see the visualized results. All data (hours) are displayed in a different color. Cells are yellow or red if days are overloaded or underloaded accordingly. The data could be displayed in percentages.

Review your capacity to ensure that you are not overbooked. The capacity view will highlight in red the overbooked portion. This is helpful when you are planning your sprint and want to ensure that all team members are accounted for.

When assigning work to individual team members, be sure to take into account their current workload. Overtaxing team members can lead to decreased productivity and potential burnout. The Capacity view in the Team panel will help you to identify when overall capacity is not balanced. Capacity reports will help to summarize the results.

If you’re looking to add a new project or workstream to your schedule, use the capacity view to determine if you have the available resources. This view quickly shows you which teams have free slots, so you can plan accordingly.

All of the tips use data from Activity Timeline. We’d love for you to give it a try for free if you haven’t tried it before. Discover more useful information about ActivityTimeline features, Schedule a Demo, or Start a Free Trial on the Atlassian Marketplace!