Developer load across projects

rsnelson wrote:

If I am a project manager (named Jerry) and I am looking at an
individual iteration plan and I see the load of a single developer,
say Sue, and Sue works on mulitple Jazz projects (say project A, B
and C) is there a way for Jerry to see Sue's total load across all
her projects BEFORE I assign a new work item to her on project A?
Assume all projects are on a single Jazz server instance.

No that is currently not possible. Please file an enhancement request

against agile planning.

--
Cheers, Johannes
Agile Planning Team

Because of the misplaced end-quote in Johannes's reply, I originally read it as " against agile planning" and I was going to pile on with "that's absolutely correct, the product should not support this". Then I realized the first part of the reply got trapped in the quote-block...

I'll still make the case. Sue (or Jerry) isn't being very Agile if her attentions are split between multiple, independent projects, particularly when you consider that within a Project Area, there may already be multiple subteams devoted to different areas (or Work Item Categories). How dedicated can she possibly be to each team's success? How long can it be before being assigned this way simply splits her apart? Why would we bend this lovely tool to such evil purposes? ;-)

If Sue really is split between independent Projects, won't each have a piece of her? Won't the percentage of time allocated to each project in her Work Environment be a sufficient way to track her load? At some level, consistent with self-directed teams, don't we need to trust her to pull work that needs to be done in those few times that she isn't already over-subscribed? Feels like needless feature-bloat to track a person's load across multiple Project Areas (because the next request will be that one of the Project Areas was migrated to a different server and now the feature is "broken").

I agree with Millard that the person probably shouldn't be split up across actual projects... However, a person may be split across different teams (all working on the same project) with their own iteration plans. Take for example, a user design expert or any cross-team integration testers. One could argue that having experts like that isn't very agile either, but in reality, I would say that's very common.

I don't know if there's a view to see a user's workload across teams, but maybe that's what the original poster was referring to...

Yes. I meant to say across teams (not projects). A major customer asked this about RTC. One way to address this I assume would be to divide the load of the user across the teams they work on so they would not get accidentally over loaded, by any one team.

Just to make sure it gets seen as a question, I'll draw it out -- I'm sure someone from the Agile Planning Team will jump in. If I had a properly configured Project Area, I'd just try it -- but I don't have one at the moment (but some of you must).

QUESTION: Within a Project Area, I have multiple Teams/Team Areas. Sue is a member of several different teams. Will Sue's workload reflect her assignments across all of her teams? If three team's each give her 20 hours of work items for a two week iteration, will she show as 75% loaded (60/80)?

SubQuestion: When I look at Sue's time from within one team's Iteration Plan, will she appeared "booked" to me if she has enough assigned hours from our Work Item Categories to fill our share? For example, if Team B has Sue for 40% of her time and they have assigned her 40 hours of work for a two week iteration, will she appear overbooked from their point of view (assume no one else has assigned her any work yet)?

Commentary: Still probably best to manage this via Sue's Work Environment, otherwise the first team to book her time "wins", but it could be very handy if one or more of her teams don't have anything for her this iteration (or enough to use up their allotment) because in that case, strict planning based on percentage assignment wont' fill her plate.

QUESTION: Within a Project Area, I have multiple Teams/Team Areas.
Sue is a member of several different teams. Will Sue's workload
reflect her assignments across all of her teams? If three team's
each give her 20 hours of work items for a two week iteration, will
she show as 75% loaded (60/80)?

Currently, the load is always scoped to a team but it respects the team

assignment. For instance, you are a member of three teams: Development
(70%), Maintainance (20%), and Exploration (10%). The team load section
for the Development team and a 1 week iteration (assuming 80hrs) will
show 56 hrs ((80/100) * 70).

SubQuestion: When I look at Sue's time from within one team's
Iteration Plan, will she appeared "booked" to me if she has
enough assigned hours from our Work Item Categories to fill our share?
For example, if Team B has Sue for 40% of her time and they have
assigned her 40 hours of work for a two week iteration, will she
appear overbooked from their point of view (assume no one else has
assigned her any work yet)?

Yes, she will be overbooked. In above example having more than 56 hrs of

work assigned will show you as overbooked, regardless of the load in
other team areas. To clarify this the team load hover always shows the
assignment too.

Commentary: Still probably best to manage this via Sue's Work
Environment, otherwise the first team to book her time
"wins", but it could be very handy if one or more of her
teams don't have anything for her this iteration (or enough to use up
their allotment) because in that case, strict planning based on
percentage assignment wont' fill her plate.

That is good objective, but teams shouldn't consider team assignments to
be set in stone. If there is busy phase in one team, more work time
should be assigned to it.

--
Cheers, Johannes
Agile Planning Team

If Sue really is split between independent Projects, won't each have a
piece of her? Won't the percentage of time allocated to each project
in her Work Environment be a sufficient way to track her load? At
some level, consistent with self-directed teams, don't we need to
trust her to pull work that needs to be done in those few times that
she isn't already over-subscribed? Feels like needless feature-bloat
to track a person's load across multiple Project Areas (because the
next request will be that one of the Project Areas was migrated to a
different server and now the feature is "broken").

I agree with you. Having load across teams should be enough (especially
as we call it 'team load'). In my initial post I was thinking if it
would make sense to add more flexibility to the load. Currently it is
always scoped to a team and one of the teams iterations. If we could
relax this we might be able to get more value out of the load section,
e.g. what is my load this week, what is the load for a set of people
(all in a project, all in a team, a selection of developers). However,
that would make the configuration more complicated, as you have to
specify a time interval and the developers explicitly.

--
Cheers, Johannes
Agile Planning Team