team member work calendar

[Alan Fisher]

I am new to scrum so may be missing something. How do I take into account team member holidays and/or utilising part time resources?

Any assistance or pointers would be greatly appreciated

Alan

[David Harris]

Hello Alan,

TeamPulse abstracts much of this detailed resource allocation management. The way to accomodate these variations in planning within TeamPulse would be by adjusting the Capacity range for your affected Iterations. For example, if your 'base' team of 5 equivalent developers is capable of completing 100-120 story points within an iteration, but one of your members will be on vacation for the entirety of the upcoming iteration, you would lower the sprint capacity range by 20% (80-96) for that individual iteration. This new capacity then drives the amount of work you would assign when planning your iteration.

For reference I have attached a screenshot of the Plan an Iteration screen where you can see an iteration with a capacity range of 200-250 and stories assigned such that the iteration is neither under nor over capacity.

Regards,
David Harris
the Telerik team

[Alan Fisher]

Thanks for your explanation David, that clarifies it for me.Your's and Telerik's support is excellent!
 
I have a few other basic questions if you dont mind.
I have decomposed some stories into tasks which have different team members allocated to different tasks within a story, meaning multiple people are working on a story. Unless I am mistaken, it appears that you can only plan an iteration by assigning stories to an iteration. Is it possible to see if i have overallocated team members (assigned tasks) or should i be making my stores more granular so that only one team member works on a story?

Thanks again
Alan

[David Harris]

Hi Alan,

It can be fairly common for multiple team members to work concurrently on one story, so while it is hard for me to state "yes or no" definitively on whether you need to decompose further, I think it's fair to say your current situation could certainly be valid.

The answer of how to approach the issue of over-allocation in this scenario can often be found in process. An ideal scrum team will be mostly cross-functional, which should lead to most team members feeling somewhat comfortable performing most tasks on the project. If this is indeed the case, then it is often best to not assign work to individuals during iteration planning, but rather for the individuals to pull work from the iteration backlog as necessary throughout the sprint. In this way, so long as the team has capacity to complete the assigned stories the work should naturally distribute itself amongst the team members.

If the team is not yet cross-functional enough to work in this manner, and it is necessary to assign specific tasks to individuals up-front in the planning phase, then unfortunately the visibility within TeamPulse in regards to task estimates and allocations is somewhat lacking. Aside from breaking those tasks out into their own stories I cannot think of a suggestion on how else to gather this data from within TeamPulse. I will add this feedback into our backlog in hopes we can address it in future releases.

Regards,
David Harris
the Telerik team

[Alan Fisher]

Thanks once again David, your reply is much appreciated. I now understand the philosophy of your product much better. 

I have some junior developers who cannot code all aspects of the system so can only allocate certain tasks to them. For now, I have created a separate iteration specifically for them and have allocated them appropriate tasks assigned to that iteration. I have assigned tasks to the other developers in another simultaneous iteration . I will have 2 iterations running in parallel so that I can 'simulate' it as though it is one. It isn't ideal but will achieve what I want.

Maybe you can suggest a better alternative, otherwise it wlll do for now

Regards
Alan

[Velin]

Hi Alan,

I'm afraid that there is not much to do in this situation and hope the solution you've found will serve you well.

Again, thank you for your valuable feedback - it will be further analyzed and possibly addressed in a future release.

Regards,
Velin
the Telerik team

[Adam]

Hi,

I came here looking for a solution to the problem of capacity management, and am frankly dumbfounded that TeamPulse does not have an "out of the box" way to determine whether an individual resource has been over-allocated in terms of hours of assigned tasks.  
Story points and task hours are two different measurements, so it is not appropriate to only plan based on velocity.  E.g. a story may have been pointed low due to low complexity but contains a high amount of hours.  In this case it is very easy for individuals to be over-allocated, which unfortunately means that it is less likely the story will be completed, especially since TeamPulse gives no insight into the problem.  

Is there a place where we can request features such as a report that shows capacity per developer and time commitment per developer?  E.g. we use the Ideas & Feedback Portal at my company; it would be nice if Telerik used this tool so the community can up-vote certain features.  

[David Harris]

Hi Adam,

I agree with your assertion that capacity planning could definitely benefit from the ability to view developer utilization, and I'm sorry that the current TeamPulse feature-set does not yet meet your needs. I'm happy to report that we do indeed use our own Ideas and Feedback Portal to accept customer feedback and engage in dialog over feature requests.  You can access the portal here: http://feedback.telerik.com/Project/8 . I encourage you to up-vote or add the features you are interested in.

Regards,
David Harris
the Telerik team

[Adam]

Thanks David.  I did find the portal shortly after posting this comment.  I'm eager to see how TeamPulse changes over the next few quarters based on community feedback.