Capacity for teams: Update time-based estimate as record timeframe changes

Setting people estimates and then visualizing a report by people per month is a key capability in estimating team capacity and the ability to execute on a roadmap. When capacity for a team is exceeded, there are usually two recourses:

• Assign the item (initiative/epic/feature) to a different team, as shown here,
  or

• Reschedule one or more of the items overloading the team to a later date. This latter is method is far more common, as an organization might not have another team it can push that feature to.

RIght now, rescheduling is poorly served by capacity planning for teams, as one needs not only to change the start/end dates on the item itself, but also to manually update the advanced capacity estimate.

For example, if I want to reschedule the initiative shown in picture 3 months later, I will have to manually transpose all values before my capacity estimates make sense. This process:

• Is prone to errors, especially with longer items that have varying loads

• Is extremely time consuming when "playing tetris" with multiple items

As a minor note: If the item I'm estimating has a 3 month duration (e.g. Mar 1 - May 31) it seems counterintuitive to be able to add people estimates for February or July, as the item will not have started or will have finished.

Suggested Solutions:

1. Filter the capacity estimates by the item's duration. E.g. an initiative lasting 3 months should only show me 3 monthly capacity inputs per team

2. Convert capacity estimates "by time" to relative times. E.g. Month 1, Month 2, Month 3. This better reflects the fact that items can be shifted in time to fit capacity.

3. Whenever an initiative is shifted in time, shift the corresponding capacity estimate by an equivalent amount. Note that this is a natural consequence of the approach described in (2)

Pain assesment:

• Without this feature, capacity planning for teams is next to no use, as we have next to no ability to act on the report's findings (or at least without great pain). I ended up having to build a worksheet in excel to deal with this issue, but this leaves me wondering why I pay for an Enterprise+ plan.

Value

• Having this feature could easily put you in the running to compete with tools like MS Project and Smartsheets, at least as far as the needs of a product manager are concerned (i.e. recommending hiring plans, estimating execution capability and bottlenecks at a high level).