Reduce team workload and help the PMO to plan capacity in Jira

One of the problems that most teams face is planning teamwork, as it’s not possible to see the real capacity at a simple glance in Jira. This usually takes time jumping between software tools and apps, trying to guess who’s free or overloaded. That slows managers down and leaves the PMO validating plans after reality has moved on. That’s why we'll share with you how to centralize this information, give more visibility to the team, and make capability planning simple, directly where you manage your teamwork in Jira.

If you’re a PMO lead, a program or team manager, you probably relate to the struggle to be constantly guessing who’s overloaded and whether your plan still holds. That guesswork costs money, time, and creates unnecessary meetings. When predictability should be the common scale to measure all project deliveries, it's usually not the case.

Planning capacity, reallocating workloads, and validating plans with planned vs. logged work should be practical and collaborative. That's why some practices should support these activities to keep every team stay in the same page.

As your project portfolio scales, the production team and their delivery scales alongside, and as it’s true that Jira tells you what's happening at the Work Item level, but it doesn’t show who can actually take on more work that week, it’s where the visibility problem comes.

Leaders often end up planning capacity based on past logs and patterns, which is slow and reactive. That gap between planning and reality becomes visible when the projects are actually running, and chaos deviates from daily and weekly catch-ups. This leaves one very clear, obvious fact: Not having capacity planning centralized allows for missing delivery dates or people burning out.

The turning point: How to make capacity visible where the work lives

The antidote is a shared hub in this regard, inside Jira, the place where you’re managing your projects. Also, some effective practices should come along.

Having a visual capacity layer inside Jira with a timeline visualizing the planned and actual occupancy of the team, and individually, would be the perfect scenario to allow leaders to spot possible overloads early, allowing them to allocate assignments simply, and overall, protecting teams from burnout while keeping project delivery dates and team health realistic.

In order to make this happen, supporting these actions in the software it’s just the first step; counting on a methodology, simple practices, or even a macro process to keep the team aligned it’s essential. Let’s go through some of those recommended practices:

10 Practices to keep capacity planning simple and effective

Here’s a practical series of practices or rituals you can start today. These are lightweight steps that will help you make capacity clear where the work lives. Pick a few, apply them weekly, and watch predictability (and team health) improve:

1. Plan in percentages or hours per person. For agile teams, a best practice is to translate story points to % or hours per week for each person. Use a simple equation:
   
                                           Person = % Planned = Work Items covered
   
   This will prevent you from the feared “phantom capacity,” making over-allocation visible instantly.
   
   
2. Map every work item allocation to specific Spaces items. A good practice is to link capacity to actual Work Items with dates specified. This way, when something slips, you can easily spot which work to move.
   
   
3. Group the team into squads. It’s something our Services team applies. Keeping people together around a specific effort for at least a few months. Stable teams build flow and reduce costs. 
   
   
4. Plan for the unknown. For every project planned, reserving from 10–15% of each person’s week it’s smart in the case of interruptions or escalations. In the next iteration, track how much it’s consumed and adjust seasonally.
   
   
5. Limit work-in-progress. Set limits of tasks per person on a set period of time (e.g., 1–2 active items per person per week). Fewer parallel tasks means fewer context switches and faster finishes. If something new must start, agree on what to stop.
   
   
6. Run a weekly capacity review to update the following 2–4 weeks. By locking the current week and making changes for the following one. This rhythm avoids day-to-day churn while keeping plans fresh enough to be useful.
   
   
7. Weekly health checks. Periodically compare planned work with what people actually did.  If someone’s overloaded, move work to next week, add a helper, or shift a date. Document the decision and save it for the project post-mortem.
   
   
8. Set limits for incoming projects. Don’t spread people into different projects, or at least not into many. Let each person work on no more than two projects at once. If they help on a second project, cap it at about 30% of their week. If a third project shows up, make a choice: delay or drop something, or assign someone else.
   
   
9. Share visuals of project capacity as a source of truth. Publish a capacity heatmap (people × weeks) or a document in your wiki so everyone can check it out simply. This will reduce status meetings.
   
   
10. Report on project progress and iterate. Tracking project development from a capacity perspective, accounting indicators such as planned vs. actual work, its variance, overtime trend, and % unplanned work will allow you to review monthly at the portfolio level to bring expectations staffing for the next sprint.

Simply, making capacity planning accessible for everyone and visible to keep project development aligned across apps, teams, and where the actual work happens requires running some short rituals to keep it honest and down to earth. With a similar foundation in place, these practices become routine and easy to apply, at the same time, making the PMO advance faster, adjusting to plans early before dates slip or people burn out.

Make capacity planning get your teams, projects, and outcomes stick together

All of the practices mentioned above succeed when capacity is clear, shared, and easy to act on. That’s exactly what a Jira-native, visual capacity layer provides: one place to plan in % or hours, link work to real items, set limits, and run quick plan-vs-actual reviews every week. The result is less guesswork, fewer status meetings, and faster, evidence-based decisions from the PMO.

Allocaty for Jira turns those simple practices into day-to-day behavior. It gives you a single, color-coded calendar inside Jira to plan and rebalance in minutes; it lets you assign work directly from the view; and with planned vs. logged in the same screen, you can spot overloads early, move work with confidence, and learn from variance. You can get a glance here:

This view shows the Logged Work vs. Plan Capacity available with Allocaty for Jira

As Allocaty for Jira lives where your teams already work, and it’s based on existing work items, adoption is quick, making governance lighter. If you’re ready to plan capacity better (and keep teams healthier), get it from the Atlassian Marketplace, switch on the calendar, run your first weekly check, and start supporting your routine, making all things capacity stick.