Track Department Capacity - Nextedy Documentation

Use this guide when part of a team’s capacity comes from an organizational unit that has no Polarion user accounts — a validation department, a shared test lab, an external supplier. The unit is assigned to the team as a resource, and the board counts it towards the team’s capacity. For what the board is actually doing with that assignment, see Department-Level Capacity.

Prerequisites

Planningboard is installed and a board is configured on a Polarion Wiki page.
The Teams Service is set up for the project, with team work items and team assignment work items in place. See Set Up Teams Service.
Capacity bars are already showing for the team’s named members. See Track Team Capacity.
The Gantt plugin is installed on the same Polarion. This is what supplies the capacity calculation.
Administration access to the project, to add a work item type, a custom field and configuration properties.

Without the Gantt plugin, department-level capacity is silently zero. The board falls back to counting assignees only, so the department contributes nothing and the capacity bar reports no error. A team staffed entirely by departments reads as having no capacity at all.

Two hours-per-day figures, two meanings. Department capacity is stated in hours per working day in two places:

On the department work item — the unit’s whole capacity, what it delivers on each working day across every team it is assigned to.
On each team assignment — the share of that capacity this one team takes.

When an assignment carries its own hours, that is what the team gets, and % Assignment is not read at all. Only an assignment without hours falls back to % Assignment, applied to the department’s whole capacity. An assignment with neither contributes nothing.Planningboard does not check that the shares of all teams add up to no more than the whole. The steps below set up both fields before the assignment is made.

Enable the Teams Service for the project

In Administration → Configuration Properties for the project, set:

nextedy.planningboard.useTeamsService=true

The default is false. This one property both enables team assignments on the board and allows the board to obtain its capacity figures from the Gantt teams service. A project that leaves it off is not using team assignments and has no team capacity to delegate.This is the main step to enable department capacity on Planningboard. The rest can be done prior as part of Gantt setup.

Create a work item type for departments

In Administration → Work Items → Types, add a type for the organizational units you want to plan with — a validation department, a test lab, a supplier. The examples on this page use the id department.This type exists so that departments can be told apart from ordinary work items when the resource field is filled in, and so that the capacity field in the next step applies only to them.

Add the capacity field to the department type

On the department type, add a float custom field for the hours the unit delivers on each working day. The examples on this page use the field id capacityHoursPerDay, with the label:Capacity (hours per working day)Fill it in on every department work item with the unit’s whole capacity — the hours it delivers on each working day, across every team it is assigned to. A department work item left with an empty capacity field falls back to 8 hours per working day.

Name the capacity field for the capacity calculation

Back in Administration → Configuration Properties, tell the capacity calculation which field to read and how to read it:

nextedy.gantt.resourceCapacityField=capacityHoursPerDay
nextedy.gantt.resourceCapacityFieldUnit=perDay

The first property names the custom field added in the previous step. The second says the value is hours per working day rather than a total for the whole period.Without these two properties the capacity field on the department work item is never read.

Add an hours field to the team assignment type

On the team assignment type, add a second float custom field for the hours one team takes from the department on each working day. The examples on this page use the field id assignmentHours, with the label:Assigned (hours per working day)Give it a label of its own: it holds one team’s share of the department, not the department’s size, and two fields with the same label are easy to confuse on the form. If the team assignment type has its own form layout, add the field to it as well — a custom field that is defined but missing from the layout does not show on the form.Then name the field for the capacity calculation:

nextedy.gantt.teamAssignmentCapacityHoursField=assignmentHours

Without this property the hours on the assignment are never read, and every assignment is sized through % Assignment instead.

Point the team assignment's resource field at departments

The team assignment work item needs a field that holds the department. Define it as an enum field scoped to the department type, so the Resource picker offers departments and nothing else:

enum:@NextedyProjectWorkItems[type:department]

Then name that field for the teams service:

nextedy.gantt.workitems.default.resource_field=resource

Replace resource with the id of the field you defined, if it differs.

Gantt 26.9.0 also allows the resource field to be named per widget, so a board whose widget configuration names a different field uses that one instead of the project-level default above.

Create the team assignment and point it at the department

Create a team assignment work item under the team, exactly as you would for a person, but:

Set the resource field to the department work item. This is what marks the assignment as department-level.
Leave the assignee empty. Not because an assignee would take precedence — it would not — but because an assignment that names both is charged on the resource side, so the person named would silently contribute nothing while still appearing as a team member.
Set the from and to dates that bracket the period the department is available to the team.
Set Assigned (hours per working day) to the hours this team takes from the department on each working day. Left empty, the assignment falls back to % Assignment of the department’s whole capacity; with neither filled in, it contributes nothing.

Size the department and each team's share

A department’s whole capacity lives in Capacity (hours per working day) on the department work item; each team’s share of it lives in Assigned (hours per working day) on that team’s assignment. Eight hours is one full-time person, so either figure divided by 8 is a number of full-time equivalents:

Should count as	Hours per working day
Half a person	`4`
Two full-time people	`16`
Five full-time people	`40`

A department of 40 shared equally between two teams therefore carries 20 on each team’s assignment.The board then works out each assignment’s contribution over the plan’s date range. With hours on the assignment, % Assignment plays no part:

capacity = working days in range
           × assigned hours per working day
           × (1 − (capModA + capModB) ÷ 100)

Without hours on the assignment, % Assignment scales the department’s whole capacity instead:

capacity = working days in range
           × capacity hours per working day
           × (% Assignment ÷ 100)
           × (1 − (capModA + capModB) ÷ 100)

The board shows the figure in working days, at eight hours to a day; set nextedy.planningboard.durationUnit=hours to show raw hours instead. For a named member, their own calendar hours take the place of the department’s per-day value. For example, a department at 40 hours per working day, assigned to a team with 40 assigned hours per working day — or, without hours on the assignment, at % Assignment 100 — over a ten-working-day plan on a team carrying capModA=10 and capModB=10, contributes 40 — five times the 8 that a member at 100% contributes over the same period.

Give each team a single assignment per department. One assignment carrying the team’s whole share is easier to keep correct than several: every extra assignment is another work item to maintain, with the resource field to set on each.

Reload the board and check the total

Reload the board, or press Refresh data in the board toolbar. The team’s capacity bar should now include the department’s contribution.Read the number at the team level, not the per-user rows: a department-level resource produces no swimlane and no line in the per-user breakdown, so the team total will be larger than the sum of the rows beneath it. That difference is the department’s contribution and is expected.

An iteration board whose column headers each show a team capacity bar, with the per-user swimlanes below showing smaller individual capacities and no row for the department

Applying capacity modifiers (optional)

If the team already uses capacity modifiers, they reduce the department exactly as they reduce a named member — no extra configuration is needed:

nextedy.gantt.useTeamCapacityModifiers=true

The two modifier percentages combine additively inside one multiplicative factor:

capacity = capacity × (1 − (capModA + capModB) ÷ 100)

So capModA=10 with capModB=10 reduces capacity by 20% — a factor of 0.8, not 0.81. The capModB term is skipped for dates within nextedy.gantt.capacityModifierBFieldDayLimit days of today. See Teams Service Properties for the field names and how to override them.

What department capacity does not do

No personal absences. A department has no Polarion user, so there is no personal leave to subtract from it. Model a known reduction by lowering the Capacity (hours per working day) value, or with a capacity modifier.
No swimlane. You cannot drag cards onto a department; work items are still assigned to people.
No per-user row. The department does not appear in the per-user capacity breakdown.
Load is unchanged. This affects the capacity side of the bar only. Effort still comes from work items assigned to individuals.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Likely cause
The department contributes nothing at all	The Gantt plugin is not installed on this Polarion, or `nextedy.planningboard.useTeamsService` is not `true` for the project.
The department contributes nothing, and the Gantt plugin is installed	The assignment carries neither Assigned (hours per working day) nor % Assignment, or the department work item’s Capacity (hours per working day) is `0` — a department of zero contributes nothing, whatever its assignments say.
The department contributes, but only one full-time day	The assignment carries no hours of its own, and Capacity (hours per working day) is empty on the department work item, so it falls back to 8, or `nextedy.gantt.resourceCapacityField` does not name that field.
The department contributes, but not the amount you expect	If the assignment carries Assigned (hours per working day), that figure is what the team gets and % Assignment is ignored. Otherwise % Assignment scales the department’s capacity — check it, then check that `nextedy.gantt.resourceCapacityFieldUnit` is exactly `perDay`; any other value, including a different capitalization, silently falls back to 8 hours per working day.
Hours entered on the assignment have no effect	`nextedy.gantt.teamAssignmentCapacityHoursField` does not name the hours field on the team assignment, so the assignment is sized through % Assignment only.
The teams’ shares add up to more than the department	Planningboard does not check this. A Gantt resource view in its Assignment Allocation load mode marks the days on which the assignments it has loaded for the department exceed the department’s capacity.
The Resource picker offers no departments	The field’s enum is not scoped to the department type — check the `enum:@NextedyProjectWorkItems[type:department]` scoping, and that department work items exist in the project.
The named assignee on an assignment shows zero capacity	Expected when the assignment also names a resource. Capacity is charged on the resource side; the assignee stays a team member but contributes nothing. Clear the resource field if the person should be charged.
The figure did not change after an edit	Press Refresh data in the board toolbar and reload the page.
The team total exceeds the sum of the per-user rows	Expected. The difference is the department-level contribution, which has no user row.

For capacity values that are wrong for reasons unrelated to departments, see Capacity Calculation Issues.

Prerequisites

Applying capacity modifiers (optional)

What department capacity does not do

Troubleshooting

See also