Recalculating the schedule
This page refers to Portfolio classic plans. If you are currently running Portfolio 2.0, please check this link to access the latest page version.
The automatic scheduling mechanism is one of the core capabilities of Portfolio for Jira. It continuously computes an optimized and realistic resource allocation, and forecasts release dates, resource utilization, and bottlenecks in your work.
When scheduling work, the scheduling mechanism takes into consideration the following:
- Priority of items in the backlog
- Sequence, which is comprised of start and end release dates
- Estimates and required skill-level capacities
- Teams and people's availability
- People's skills - what type of work can do each team member.
- Varying availability and absences. For example: vacations, people available only from certain date and so on.
- バックログ アイテム間の依存関係
- Work's stages - activities that can happen either in parallel or sequential activities.
- Team's schedules - iterations and sprint lengths, or continuous, day-to-day schedule.
Configurable constraints, for example how many people can work in parallel on a story.
Scheduling calculation triggers
Scheduling for a one-piece-flow
With its origins in manufacturing and lean production, the concept of achieving a one-piece flow has long found it's way into software development. Portfolio for Jira also borrows from this concept. The scheduling algorithm is tuned to complete individual deliverables (in this case, stories) as quickly as possible.
- Finishing stories end-to-end has priority. Once the effort of a story is started, it would rather complete the first story before starting a new one.
- Schedule for deliverable increments: Take stories into an iteration / release only if can be delivered completely, no "partial" scheduling just because there are some man days of capacity left.
- Run through stages of work per work item: When planning e.g. for design and implementation, this means design for one story, and implementation for one story, rather than a design phase for all stories, before starting all the implementation tasks.
Note: We've picked this scheduling approach, since it reflects most intuitively what happens in real life. Once you start working down your backlog, you'd rather try to complete full work packages before starting something new. Some things need to happen sequentially, like you'd first write a user story before implementing it.
At the same time, it gives full flexibility: If you need to do for example larger up-front design, just add a work package with effort estimates only for design capacities.
Portfolio for Jira has a planning horizon of 5 years by default. If you believe that your schedule isn't being displayed properly and your estimates are for less than 5 years, please check your team's capabilities and estimates. If you require a planning horizon up to 30 years, please contact Atlassian Support.