Brief summary of this article:
Capacity Planning views and reports of Targetprocess product allow to compare demand as planned workload with available capacity of team members who do the work. It is especially helpful to Product Managers, Product Owners, Release Train Engineers, Scrum Masters, Project Managers as they determine whether the overall goals can be achieved with the available teams. Delivery against roadmaps becomes more predictable when capacity is taken into account.
How it works
On Capacity Planning views, warnings and color highlights indicate overloaded teams and people. It allows management to eliminate excess of limits in advance. Plan, postpone, or split work items, change team assignments and headcount, involve contractors to distribute the workload more evenly. The absence of overloads decreases risk of possible delays.
Capacity Planning tools play an important role in productive communication and collaboration between teams and management. Use them during sprint planning and pre-PI planning to assure match of team commitments with business expectations.
Work-Time-People assignments
For effective management, large initiatives, product increments, and projects are broken down into smaller, similarly sized work items. At different scale of planning levels, these pieces of structured work are assigned to time periods of appropriate length. Such breakdown allows to see both detailed and bird's eye view pictures and switch between short-time tactic and long-time strategic planning horizons. It also enables independent team work and decreases development lead time.
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.
Targetprocess supports multiple Agile and Scaling Agile frameworks, including SAFe®. SAFe defines the following four levels with work/people/time relations and key roles:
| Level | Work items | People | Time period | Key Roles |
| Team | User Stories, Bugs | Team(s)
Individuals |
Scrum Sprint(s) (Iterations) | Product Owner
Scrum Master |
| Program | Features | 1 Agile Release Train (ART)
Teams |
Program Increment(s) (PIs) | Product Manager
Program Manager Release Train Engineer System Architect |
| Value Stream (Large Solution) | Capabilities | 1 Solution Train
Agile Release Trains (ARTs) |
Program Increments (PIs) | Solution Management
Value Stream Engineer Solution Train Engineer Solution Architect |
| Portfolio | Initiatives, Epics | Value Streams | Program Increments (PIs)
Financial calendar quarters |
Lean Portfolio Management
Epic Owners Enterprise Architect |
Available Solutions
Targetprocess supports Capacity Planning views and reports for the following levels:
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