Capacity planning for teams: define story point average velocity at the team level

Who would benefit?

Teams using story points for team capacity planning

What impact would it make?

Greater flexibility to accurately define a team's available capacity in story points

How should it work?

Background:

• Story point average velocity (total story points completed per set of intervals, divided by number of intervals) is calculated per team. This establishes available capacity in story points.

• Story point velocity (available capacity) is defined in capacity planning in work schedules, as story points per week.

The problem:

• Work schedules are almost always assigned to multiple teams, but teams will almost always have different average velocities.

• The only way around this is to create a work schedule for every variation of story point capacity.

How should it work:

• Continue to allow defining the (base) available capacity in story points on work schedules, and

• Allow override of this value at the team level

Impact:

• This will enable teams to have the minimum number of work schedules and teams, and provide enough flexibility to calculate accurate available capacity in story points.