Rally Software

  • 1.  What "units" are applicable to the "PRELIM ESTIMATE", "REFINED ESTIMATE", "GROUP ESTIMATE", and "ALLOCATE" fields employed in Capacity Planning (in PORTFOLIO tab)?

    Posted Nov 08, 2016 10:11 AM

    I'm trying to develop a development plan for a multi-team using "Capacity Planning" in the PORTFOLIO tab. I can't find information about the relationship between the various fields; namely PRELIM ESTIMATE, REFINED ESTIMATE, GROUP ESTIMATE, and ALLOCATE. And I can't find any explanation of the "units" or values applied to those fields!  Can anyone explain? Any help would be greatly appreciated!



  • 2.  Re: What "units" are applicable to the "PRELIM ESTIMATE", "REFINED ESTIMATE", "GROUP ESTIMATE", and "ALLOCATE" fields employed in Capacity Planning (in PORTFOLIO tab)?

    Posted Nov 08, 2016 01:03 PM

    I can only tell you how we use it, but my understanding is that those figures are typically expressed in story points. For example, in my world a Medium-sized feature has a Preliminary Estimate value that maps to 30 story points. During planning our teams might examine that feature and decide that it would really require more like 45 points' worth of stories to complete the feature so they'd enter that in Refined Estimate and that's the number we'd use when evaluating whether that feature would make the cut at one of our quarterly planning sessions. Hope that helps.



  • 3.  Re: What "units" are applicable to the "PRELIM ESTIMATE", "REFINED ESTIMATE", "GROUP ESTIMATE", and "ALLOCATE" fields employed in Capacity Planning (in PORTFOLIO tab)?

    Posted Nov 09, 2016 09:45 AM

    Thanks Eric ... I appreciate your quick reply. You didn't mention the "Group Estimate" ... Do your teams use it? If so, how and when? As for the units, are you still employing/assuming Story Points when you use "Allocate" to define the sharing of work across teams? For example, you might allocate 40 story points of 60-story point Feature to a particular team, and the remaining story points to another team (or teams)?  Please let me know --- Thanks again!



  • 4.  Re: What "units" are applicable to the "PRELIM ESTIMATE", "REFINED ESTIMATE", "GROUP ESTIMATE", and "ALLOCATE" fields employed in Capacity Planning (in PORTFOLIO tab)?

    Posted Nov 09, 2016 12:56 PM

    When we split a feature we allocate the Refined Estimate points for that feature across the teams working on it using the Group Estimate field just as you described above. You also described Allocate as a field and not a function in your original post- are you seeing a field in the database that I'm unfamiliar with?



  • 5.  Re: What "units" are applicable to the "PRELIM ESTIMATE", "REFINED ESTIMATE", "GROUP ESTIMATE", and "ALLOCATE" fields employed in Capacity Planning (in PORTFOLIO tab)?

    Posted Nov 09, 2016 05:09 PM

    I mis-spoke re: Allocate ... it is a function available for each Feature in the PORTFOLIO ITEMS list (on the leftside of the Capacity Planning page)

     

     

    When 'Allocate' is selected, we see yet another 'Estimate' field ...

     

    This Estimate field appears to populate the Group Estimate field ... I assume that you use it to populate the 'Group Estimate' field, again with Story Point units. Is that correct? Thanks again for taking time to explain!



  • 6.  Re: What "units" are applicable to the "PRELIM ESTIMATE", "REFINED ESTIMATE", "GROUP ESTIMATE", and "ALLOCATE" fields employed in Capacity Planning (in PORTFOLIO tab)?

    Posted Nov 10, 2016 07:39 AM

    Absolutely correct! Happy to work through this and I hope it's been helpful for you.