Connecting Sprint Capacity to Resource Capacity

[Ryan S]

Prior to even considering SPM, the IT teams began using Agile Dev 2.0 to manage their work, including capacity planning. This was done by entering the 'group capacity (points)' on each Sprint and entering points on each story. Now it's easy to see, at an Agile Team level, the capacity/availability for each sprint. Now that we're considering SPM it introduces the various resource and capacity management features. Is there a way to just use the existing process (track group capacity at a sprint level) and feed that into a form of capacity planning in SPM, or do we need to redo our process to have everything start at the resource level with resource/operational plans?

If we do the latter, what's the point of still entering group capacity in the sprints? Shouldn't that come from resource management or capacity planning views?

[Lauri Arra]

Team capacity in terms of points is conceptually completely different than group's capacity to produce person hours. As such, there is no OOB way to connect the two. 

If you're working as an agile team, the team members would be allocated 80%-100% for corresponding operational plan or project resource plan. After this allocation, you are free to either use or ignore the points and sprint capacity features. Naturally, you can create a custom logic that uses the team members' capacity or allocation data to generate a value to the team capacity, but this would both introduce a custom logic AND a completely arbitrary way of using the points.

If you're using teams to allocate work effort: use resource plans and "planned effort" on Stories.
If you're using teams for agile development: use points to capture development complexity and team's ability to produce/change features

[Ryan S]

Hi @Lauri Arra  thanks for the reply. In this case the team is doing capacity-driven sprint planning where points are essentially hours. So the team's capacity for a given sprint may be 100 hours aka points. If there's a separate "planned effort" field to use we could, but it would effectively be doing the same thing.

We can certainly create operational resource plans to capture that work. For hybrid projects in PPM, the teams would have agile phase(s) to which they can associate their stories. So I think I'm asking how to merge the last two points you made:

"If you're using teams to allocate work effort: use resource plans and "planned effort" on Stories.
If you're using teams for agile development: use points to capture development complexity and team's ability to produce/change features"

We're doing both, sort of. With agile dev the points are the effort and therefore reflect capacity. Trying to figure out how you do both within SPM.

[Lauri Arra]

Most simple solution would be to just manually review and set the team's capacity once or twice a month. The problem in building an automatically updating feature is that you have several options on how to do the resource allocations. For example, if you're using the projects and agile phases, you could make resource plans for:

1. Project
2. Each agile phase
3. Each sprint within the agile phases

Once you do the resourcing, a human agent can see that what amount of work is allocated for the team and setting the team capacity based on this review is a matter of updating one field manually.

On the other hand, trying to automatically read team capacity from the resource plans could be more challenging as there is no guaranteed relationship between the group and tasks you're allocating work for.

One possible solution would go like this:

1. Find relevant tasks for the team
   1. query sprint, project, and project task (agile phase) tables
2. Find resource allocations using group and tasks from 1 as query condition
3. Calculate the amount of allocated work (hours) for a time period that matches one Sprint
4. Set the value found in 3 to team capacity

While you can technically achieve the above, it might be difficult to maintain as eventually someone wants to do the resourcing a bit differently or something else changes and then nobody knows where the team capacity is coming from. 

Another technical approach is to enhance visibility to group's allocations, which helps in manually setting the capacity. For example, add a related list or report to team that shows the group's allocated work (from group_resource_aggregate_monthly), but please note that querying this table can be a bit heavy.