4. Managing your teams
Before you begin
Depending on how your organization is structured, the content on this page is meant for Portfolio for Jira administrators or Portfolio plan owners.
The guide discusses the typical end-to-end path that users and administrators may find themselves taking part in when using Portfolio for Jira. You'll also find high-level content on Portfolio concepts, as well as some recommendations and optional steps you can consider, as you flesh out your plan.
Managing teams
Portfolio for Jira lets you add Jira users as team members in your plan. For each plan, you can create new teams, choose the scheduling method for these teams, and assign tasks to these teams as well.
Teams can be plan-specific or shared across plans. Plan-specific teams are called private teams in Portfolio for Jira, and these let you play around with what-if scenarios for plans that aren't formally established yet.
Before you begin, note that accessing the functionality of teams is different between plans with the improved interface and live plans (versions 2.0 to 2.27).
- Accessing teams in plans with the improved interface
You can access the functionality of teams via the teams view at the top left section of your plan.
- Accessing teams in live plans (versions 2.0 to 2.27)
You can access the functionality of teams via the teams tab at the top right section of your plan.
Whether you're using a live plan or a plan with the improved interface, you can perform the following basic team management tasks:
- Creating and deleting teams
- Editing and sharing teams
- Assigning work to teams
To start managing the teams in your plan, see Teams in live plans or Teams in plans with the improved interface. Note that there are functionality differences between these types of plans. See Changes in the improved interface and Future releases and limitations to know more about these differences.
Best practices when managing teams
Once you've created your plan, we recommend to keep in mind the following best practices for your team configurations. Note that these are only recommendations, and your configurations should be aligned with how your teams work in your organization. In saying that, always keep in mind velocity and capacity metrics when you're setting up your teams.
| Team velocity |
When auto-scheduling a plan, individual capacity is calculated by dividing the weekly team capacity by the number of members. This applies to Kanban teams and Scrum teams that use time-based estimation. |
| Private and shared teams | Depending on how your teams work, you may want to consider creating shared teams in your plan. A private team is sufficient if you're sure that the team will only be working on the issues covered in that plan. However, if you know that your Mobile development team will be working on issues in both iOS expansion and Android expansion plans , then making the team a shared one might be beneficial. We also recommend using shared teams if you want to have the same team in different plans, for high-level planning. For example, your teams have their own plans, but you need a high-level department plan to get visibility across all teams. Ideally, you'd want to have the same shared team in both plans. |
Using the team field in Jira | The team custom field that comes from Portfolio for Jira, i.e. it's not one of the default fields that would appear in your issues in Jira. We recommend that you make the team field display in your Jira issues for visibility, so you can set the team field when editing or creating issues in Jira . Any assigned teams in Portfolio will also surface in the corresponding issues in Jira. You can also use the team field as a quick filter — perhaps filter for work at the epic hierarchy level of your board, so you can quickly show how work is distributed across multiple teams. |