Monitoring progress of work
Monitoring the progress of the work of your teams is equally important when planning work. By monitoring progress, you can quickly see if there are potential bottlenecks, and you can act on these bottlenecks so they don't end up happening.
There are several ways to monitor the progress of the work of your teams across your Portfolio plans.
Using the progress bar
You can add the progress columns in your roadmap, to visualize the issues in your plan with the following status categories:
- blue, for issues that are still in the To do status category
- yellow, for issues in the In progress status category
- green, for issues in the Done status category
You can choose to display progress using estimates or issue count, or even both, as shown in the sample plan below. Note that you need to add these columns to your plan so these details will display accordingly.
This sample plan is using hours to estimate issues, and the two (2) progress columns are displaying progress in terms of the estimated hours, and in terms of the number of issues. Note that you can use one or the other, or even both progress types at the same time. Both progress types can provide different levels of information, which you'll find useful when monitoring overall progress.
Understanding progress using estimates
You can use the estimates of issues to monitor the progress of work. By default, estimate-based progress is based off the aggregated estimates from all descendant issues.
Hover over the progress bar (estimate unit), and see the breakdown of work in estimates, as shown in the sample below.
The progress details show the following:
- PLAT-2 has an estimate of 15 hours, and is already done.
- WEB-23 has an estimate of 5 hours, and is still to do.
- Both estimates roll up to the parent issue PM-4, with a rolled-up estimate of 20 hours.
- 5 hours is 25% of 20 hours, as indicated in the progress details for the To do status category.
- 15 hours is 75% of 20 hours, as indicated in the progress details for the Done status category.
However, if an epic has an estimate, then the progress of its parent issue will include the estimate of that epic and the rolled up estimates of its child issues, as shown in the sample below.
The progress details show the following:
- The epic IOS-1 has an estimate of 80 hours, and also has a rolled-up estimate value of 90 hours from its child issues.
- The initiative PM-1, which is the parent initiative of epic IOS-1, has a total of 170 hours — which comes from the estimate of 80 hours for the epic itself, and the rolled-up estimates of 90 hours from its child issues.
- The progress bar (hours) for the initiative PM-1 takes into account the total of 170 hours — coming from the estimate of the epic itself and the rolled-up estimates of the child issues of the epic.
- The progress bar only displays for a parent issue if its direct child issues are estimated. If a parent initiative has child epics that are not estimated, the progress bar will not display for the parent initiative. Moreover, the progress bar will still not display for the parent initiative even if the child stories of the epics are estimated. In this case, the progress bar will only display for the epics, since the child stories are estimated.
- If you use days to estimate work in your plan, the progress details will be displayed in day units accordingly.
Any issues that are not saved to Jira will not be taken into account in calculating progress.
Understanding progress using issue count
You can also use issue count to monitor the progress of work, as shown in the sample plan below.
The progress details show the following:
- The initiative PM-4 has two (2) child epics: PLAT-2 and WEB-23. In effect, the progress bar covers a total of 2 issues.
- There is 1 issue that is still to do, and this is WEB-23. Since there's a total of 2 issues, WEB-23 is 50% of the total issue count.
- There's also 1 issue that's already done, and this is PLAT-2. This issue is also 50% of the total issue count.
- The estimated hours for each issue are not taken into account by the progress bar, since progress here only covers issue count.
Any issues that are not saved to Jira will not be taken into account in calculating progress.
Monitoring capacity
To monitor capacity in your plan, you first need to show capacity in the timeline of your plan. This is only possible if you group issues by teams.
Once capacity is displayed in your team, you can then visualize how team-specific work is distributed across multiple sprints. This helps you determine if too much work has been scheduled for a sprint, and helps you plan out how to distribute work in overbooked sprints.
Samples of healthy and unhealthy sprints
In the above example, clicking the capacity bar of a sprint will display the capacity details which may include:
- The start and end dates of the sprint
- The status of the sprint, whether it's an active, future, or projected sprint
- The percentage of issues that have been completed
- With the default velocity set to 30 story points, the percentage of how full the sprint is in terms of the estimated story points. If the team is estimating issues in hours or days, this will reflect in the percentage accordingly.
- The number of unestimated issues in the sprint
The Dingo sprint is showing a red capacity bar, which means too much work has been allocated to that sprint. With this visual indicator in the timeline, you can then quickly consider how to fix this up — either by removing some issues from that sprint, or adding more people to the corresponding team.
Understanding capacity details in Scrum and Kanban
For both Scrum and Kanban teams, the capacity bars reflect how work is evenly distributed across the corresponding duration (sprints for Scrum, iterations for Kanban). This is the basic premise on how work is distributed in the current plans.
There are some differences to note about how bars reflect capacity details however.
For Scrum teams:
- When using story point estimates, velocity is measured against the sprint duration. If velocity is set to 30 story points for a 2-week sprint, the capacity details will show the percentage of how full the sprint is in terms of the estimated story points.
- When using time-based estimates, capacity is measured against the duration of a week. If weekly capacity is set to 200 hours for a 2-week sprint, the capacity details will show the percentage of how full the sprint is in terms of the estimated hours.
- Even if a story spans multiple sprints, its estimate will consume capacity from the sprint that's assigned to it. For instance, TIS-123 is scheduled for 20 days, and it spans sprints 1 and 2 because each sprint runs for 10 days. TIS-123 is assigned to sprint 1, so its estimate of 30 story points will be allocated to sprint 1.
For Kanban teams:
Capacity is measured against the duration of a week. If weekly capacity is set to 200 hours, then the capacity details will show the percentage of how full the iteration is in terms of the estimated hours.
To know more about showing sprints and capacity in your plan, see Grouping by teams.
Monitoring releases
From the releases view
You can jump to the releases view of your plan, to grab a high-level view of how work is tracking. More importantly, this will help you realistically determine if your teams can complete the work assigned to the releases in your plan.
Releases view, with sample releases
In the example above, you can quickly see the releases that are on track and off track. As long as the start and end dates of the issues fall within the start and end dates of their corresponding releases, then the releases stay on track.
You can drill down on what's blocking this release by doing any of the following:
- View the release in the roadmap of the plan, to see if there are any blockers for the pending issues.
- For project releases, view the release in Jira, to see a condensed list of all the issues assigned to that release, and possibly to change the release dates as needed.
- Hover on the progress bar of a release, to check how many issues are still to be completed.
At the moment, the progress bar only includes the details of the issues that are currently visible in the plan. This means that old releases may not have accurate information.
From the timeline section
You can also track the progress of releases directly in the timeline section of a plan.
Sample plan with releases in the timeline
Green icons represent releases that are on track, while red ones are for releases that are off track. As long as the start and end dates of the issues fall within the start and end dates of their corresponding releases, then the releases stay on track. Click on an icon to view more details about the release, and more importantly, to determine how you can fix the state of off track releases.
The number of releases could accumulate over time, which can make it hard to navigate from one release to another on the timeline. There may be times when releases are only one day apart, or there may be multiple releases scheduled on the same day.
If this happens in your plan, try doing one of the following:
| Jumping from one release to another | Click a release icon, and then click either the left arrow or the right arrow, to jump to the next release. While jumping from one release to another, the details of each release will be displayed accordingly.
Sample multiple releases on the timeline |
| Viewing details of multiple releases | Occasionally, you may see a number above a release icon. In the sample release below, the number denotes that there are 2 releases scheduled on the same day. Click on the release icon to see the releases scheduled for that day, and then click the right arrow of each release to view more details about it.
Sample releases scheduled on the same day |
| Highlighting releases on the timeline | If there are any releases that you want to keep an eye on, you can highlight these releases on your timeline. This helps make any relevant releases stand out in your timeline. Click the Highlight on timeline check box, and the release will be displayed with either a red or green line in the timeline.
Sample releases highlighted on the timeline |
| Filtering issues by a release | You can also filter issues by a release, which will display the corresponding issues filtered by sprint in the roadmap view.
Sample issues filtered by a release in the roadmap view |
| Filtering issues by projects | You can also filter issues by projects, which will display only the releases of the relevant projects. To further narrow down on the release details, consider filtering the issues by a single project.
Issues filtered by the IOS project, with releases filtered as well |
