Jira Resource Management Reimagined: Advanced Features to Maximize Team Capacity

[#1]

Project managers, team leads, and anyone juggling team workloads – this one's for you.

Knowing who's available, who's overloaded, or who can take on the next critical task often feels like a guessing game.

If you're tired of reshuffling and discovering bottlenecks too late, setting up a clear resource management process from the start with the Planyway plugin for Jira is crucial. In this guide we will share greatest features to make the process of managing your team’s capacity flawless.

Step 1. See who is doing what

First things first, you need to see what's going on. Planyway shows you exactly what every team member is working on, across all your projects and even across different teams. This isn't just a pretty Gantt chart. It's an interactive, living plan of work. 

 

You can instantly visualize who's assigned to what and track cross-project dependencies. No more frantic scrolling through Jira filters – it's all there, beautifully laid out.

Step 2. Manage workload automatically

Workload isn't something you have to manually calculate – it works automatically! You'll instantly see who's overloaded and who's underloaded, allowing you to make informed decisions about task distribution. 

Balancing the workload is ridiculously simple. See someone looking a bit red (overloaded)? Just drag and stretch their task cards to the right or left on the timeline to redistribute the effort. It's incredibly intuitive.

Workload works across any timeline scale – whether you're planning daily, weekly, or monthly.

Step 3. Flexible settings to fit your project flow

Planyway is smart about how it calculates workload too. You can set it up in the settings to factor in original estimates, internal estimates, and even remaining time. This flexibility ensures the workload reflects your team's reality as accurately as possible.

The app even suggests two fantastic workload modes:

• Balance Mode: evenly distributes the estimated work across all available workdays for a given task. Perfect for tasks that have a steady flow of effort.
• Liquid Mode: fills each day up to capacity before moving the remaining work to the next day. Ideal for when you want team members to focus intensely on one thing until it's done.

Step 4. Customize work schedules, holidays, and vacations

People aren't robots, and their availability isn't always a rigid 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday. Planyway understands this perfectly. You can easily set individual work schedules for each team member, choosing the number of hours they work each day of the week.

Got a team member taking a much-deserved vacation? Or a national holiday coming up? No problem! You can add holiday schemes and vacation days.

You can set these schemes separately for each individual team member, ensuring your workload calculations are always accurate and reflect real-world availability. This level of granularity is a game-changer for accurate planning.

Step 5. Time tracking and reporting — all in one place

Let's be honest, time tracking can sometimes feel like a separate, clunky process. But with Planyway, it's integrated seamlessly, which is just fantastic for keeping everything in one app under the same price tag. 

Your team members can track their time directly in the Jira time tracking field, or they can use dedicated views within Planyway – both seamlessly sync with that same Jira field. No more double-entry or confusion.

 

Planyway builds comprehensive reports on tracked time by users, projects, and more. You can even generate reports that compare planned time versus actual tracked time – invaluable for refining future estimates and improving project predictability. And because knowledge is power, everything is exportable and sharable, making stakeholder communication super easy.

Happy to get your feedback about the resource planning features you're missing in Jira in the comments below. We'll make you sure you get them!