Brief summary of this article:
Capacity Planning views and reports on Team level allow to compare demand as planned workload with available capacity of team members who do the work. It is especially helpful to Product Owners and Scrum Masters as they determine whether the overall iteration goals can be achieved with the available team.
On Capacity Planning views, warnings and color highlights indicate overloaded teams and people. It allows to eliminate excess of limits in advance. Plan, postpone, or split work items, change assignments to distribute the workload more evenly. The absence of overloads decreases risk to uncomplete all the forecasted backlog items and not reach iteration goals.
Capacity Planning tools play an important role in productive communication and collaboration between teams and management. Use them during iteration planning to assure match of team commitments with business expectations.
Work-Time-People assignments
In Targetprocess, work is planned into time periods and people are assigned to work. Work may have estimates of size (effort). People availability or velocity per time period is defined. Capacity Planning views and reports compare demand as total size or count of planned work versus available capacity of assigned people in a time period.
Capacity Planning capabilities for Team backlogs support the following work/people/time relations:
| Work items | People | Time period |
| User Stories, Bugs | Team(s)
Individuals |
Scrum Sprint(s) (Iterations) |
Useful Capacity Planning views and reports on Team level include:
- Iteration Planning view
- PI Planning view
- People Capacity view
Iteration Planning view
The view allows to distribute backlog items (user stories, bugs) across team iterations (sprints) for a single team. Usually teams plan a next or track a current iteration with this view.
The view helps to ensure that total amount of assigned items does not exceed planned Capacity or Velocity of a given team.
More information: Iteration Planning view
PI Planning view
This view allows to distribute backlog items (user stories, bugs) across team iterations (sprints) for multiple teams within a single Program Increment (PI). Usually Release Train Engineers create such view to plan a next or track a current PI.
More information: PI Planning view
People Capacity view
Most Agile teams possess all the required skills. Moreover, great Agile teams have shared skill sets. It unlocks the power of the team members to substitute each other if necessary. Should it happen, an idle team member can start any next task, noone becoming a critical path. As soon as personal WIP limits are preserved, there is no need to take into account personal workload.
However sometimes it's necessary to call on specialists for specific work. And it is important to make sure that a specialist is not overloaded. People Capacity view helps to solve this challenge.
The view displays backlog items (user stories, bugs) assigned to individuals for a given team iteration (sprint). Usually teams plan a next or track a current iteration with this view.
More information: People Capacity View
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