Team Capacity for Jira — Documentation
A simple team capacity & sprint workload heatmap on any Jira dashboard — see who is overloaded, near capacity or has room, in five seconds.
What it does
Team Capacity for Jira is a dashboard gadget for capacity planning and workload management in Jira. It reads the sprint your Scrum board is running, sums each person's estimated work, compares it to their capacity, and renders one color-coded bar per assignee:
- Overloaded — load is above capacity (>100 % by default)
- Near capacity — 85–100 % by default
- On track — comfortably inside capacity
- Has capacity — below 50 % by default, room for more work
- Unassigned — sprint work nobody owns yet gets its own row, so nothing hides
There is deliberately one screen and no wizard — this is a sprint workload balancer, not a portfolio/PPM suite. It answers one question fast: can my team actually take this on?
Setup in 30 seconds
- Open any Jira dashboard → Add gadget → search for “Team Capacity”.
- Click the gadget's Edit (pencil) menu.
- Board — pick a Scrum board (company-managed and team-managed both work). You only see boards you have permission to browse.
- Sprint — leave on Active sprint (auto), or pin a specific sprint (recent closed sprints are available too).
- Measure workload by — the board's estimate (Story Points or time) or plain issue count.
- Capacity per person — one default number for everyone, in the unit above (e.g. 20 points per sprint).
- Save. The heatmap renders immediately and refreshes automatically every 15 minutes.
How workload is measured
Board estimate (default)
The gadget uses the estimation setting your board already has — nothing to re-enter, nothing to sync:
- Story Points — company-managed “Story Points” and team-managed “Story point estimate” both work; if the board's configured field is empty the gadget falls back to the canonical Story Points field.
- Time estimates — boards that estimate with Original estimate are converted to hours automatically.
- Issues without an estimate contribute 0 and are still counted in the per-person issue count.
Issue count
Teams that don't estimate can measure workload as issues per person — the heatmap and capacity then use “issues per sprint” as the unit, clearly labelled.
Capacity, thresholds & colors
- Default capacity applies to everyone and is a free feature.
- Per-person capacity PRO — override individuals: part-timers, new joiners, vacation weeks, on-call rotations. Load “Load team members…” in Edit mode and type a number next to a person; leave blank to use the default.
- Count only unfinished work PRO — exclude Done issues so bars show the remaining load mid-sprint.
- Custom thresholds PRO — define where “near capacity” and “overloaded” start (defaults: 85 % / 100 % / below 50 % = free capacity).
CSV export — estimate vs actual PRO
The Export CSV button in the gadget view downloads one row per person for the shown sprint: load (estimate), capacity, utilization %, status, issue counts, done count and time spent (from Jira work logs, in hours) — the estimate-vs-actual view retros and stakeholder reports ask for. Opens directly in Excel/Google Sheets.
Sharing & permissions — who can do what
| Action | Who |
|---|---|
| Install the app | A Jira site admin, once, via the Atlassian Marketplace. |
| Add & configure the gadget | Any user — no admin rights needed. Create your own dashboard (or use one you can edit), add the gadget, pick a board. |
| Share the view with the team | Standard Jira dashboard sharing: share the dashboard with a project, group, or everyone on the site. Viewers need no setup and see the gadget immediately. |
| See board data | Each viewer sees only boards whose project they can browse — the app checks the viewer's own Jira permissions on every request. Someone without access sees a permission message, never data. |
Permissions & privacy
- The app is read-only — it cannot change any Jira data.
- Every viewer only sees boards whose project they can browse; the app checks your Jira project permissions server-side on every request.
- Built on Atlassian Forge with zero external egress — your data never leaves Atlassian (“Runs on Atlassian”).
- Details: Privacy Policy · Security Policy.
FAQ
“No estimates on these issues”
Your board estimates with points/time but the sprint's issues have no estimates yet. Add estimates — or switch Measure workload by to issue count.
“No active or recent sprint found”
The selected board has no active sprint. Start one, or pin a specific (e.g. future) sprint in Edit mode.
“You do not have permission to view this board”
The app enforces Jira project permissions per viewer. Ask your admin for Browse Projects on the board's project.
Why is there an “Unassigned” row?
Sprint work without an assignee is real load that belongs to nobody yet — hiding it would make the team look less busy than it is. It's shown as its own grey row (without capacity).
Very large sprints
The gadget reads up to 500 issues per sprint. Bigger sprints show a banner and a partial sum.
Which boards are supported?
Scrum boards — company-managed and team-managed. Kanban (date-window) support is on the roadmap.
Support
Questions, bugs, feature requests → Support page · support@janekbehrens.de
See also: Privacy Policy · Security Policy · Terms of Service