Capacity planning in Mattermost

Returned managing an internal/external dev team after a while, I would like to add a capacity planning view, so to better understand when a delivery is feasible based on available capacity and activities estimated effort.

A while ago I have had created this Excel for doing this wanted to ask if something similar is available/obtainable in Mattermost

Hi @davide445z and welcome to the Mattermost forums!

I’m not 100% sure, but you could have a look at the boards plugin, it might be a fit here, but I don’t think it’s able to do the calculations automatically, but then again, it has an API, so you could have the values of cards update based on others if you write a program for that.

Here’s a screenshot of a sprint planning template and in the left menu you can see all other available templates:

Also here’s a link showing how to do project management with this product (which is not capacity planning, I know, but it comes close):

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@agriesser hi Alexander I have had a look at the marketplace but didn’t see anything capable providing that feature.

The tool probably nearest in achieving my needs is SmartSheet, but in this case is also a substitute of Mattermost mostly, and not available on premise for a small team.

PS I tested Smartsheet and I’m totally unimpressed, really far away from what I thought.
I find bizare in 2023 there seems to be no tool for allocating a small team capacity, if you have any suggestion of something I will be able to couple with Mattermost I will be happy to consider it.

I’m not sure I understand the requirements here, so I’m not sure what to suggest. To me it looks like you’re trying to assign available resources of people to projects over a timeline and that’s why I think Boards could help, at least to some extent. @wuwinson does have much better understand of what the boards plugin is able to do, maybe he can spit some ideas.

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If you look at my Excel example the idea is exactly the opposite: allocating the task effort to resources, eventually splitting the single task effort btw multiple resources, having the check of the summed up allocation exhausting the estimated effort, getting out in a timeline when the task will be finished based on allocated capacity.
Doing this for a pool of multiple tasks, so you got in the end a 100% allocated team and a view of the possible delivery date for every task.
Ideally being able to group tasks by project/macro activity.
Maybe enterprise tools like Mavenlink are able to do this, I don’t know at what cost.
The addressed problem is that normally you have always many activities and a limited pool of resources, so your problem is getting out when you will be able to deliver something and communicate this date to the customer.

This can be easily done in one of the infinite traditional project management tools where you have your project plan and allocate one activity to one resource, but if you want to split an activity among many resources there the problems begins and previous method is much more efficient.

Perhaps you should write a paper on what tool exactly you need. From what you’ve been saying, this sounds very specific, especially if not even project management tools are sufficient.

Let me assure you, if your solution method would be popular, there would be tools out there for it.

Did you have suggestions where to publish these specs, apart here

@davide445z Boards isn’t able to do capacity planning exactly the way you have in your spreadsheet. The closest we can get to that is via calculations on table view and grouping by a person property.

We’re also tracking a similar idea on Feature Idea: WIP Limits for Kanban boards · Issue #3158 · mattermost/focalboard · GitHub, feel free to add your feedback directly on that ticket. Thanks!

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