Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the constant work with no way to manage and prioritise your work? Well, this is the guide for you! Introducing: Deliver with less fuss.

This is a practical guide for designers to help manage their work and capacity in JSW. This isn’t a perfect science and might never be, and not every part of the process will work perfectly. As long as it covers 80% of your work management needs, you’ll start to see positive results.

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🗓 Planning your work

This simple and practical guide empowers designers to manage and communicate their workload and capacity more efficiently. This method allows designers to work more effectively with their time. I’ve been using this method within Atlassian’s Growth Design Studio for nearly two years, and we’ve seen great results. e.g. increased design output, better communication, and improved focus time.

☑️ Hal recommends first applying this working practice as an experiment before changing everything.

🟪 Epics

Epics help you plan your quarter from a high-level point of view, allowing your team to see how your work is connected holistically.

☑️ Hal recommends adding as much information into the epic’s description as possible. This should be your source of truth; adding this information into a single location means you don’t have to repeat it in individual tasks.

🟦 Tasks

Tasks allow you to plan the scope of work involved in each epic. This gives your team a better understanding of the depth and complexity involved. Tasks are a breakdown of the design work required in each phase.

☑️ Hal recommends adding some high-level tasks during your planning sessions and then further refining those tasks as you get a better understanding of what is involved. 

Don’t over plan here; try to keep things light until you feel 80% to 90% sure what will happen within each project. Hal has overplanned and then ended up deleting a lot of JSW tasks… #truestory

Story points = your estimate in days

In each task, you can capture the amount of effort involved using story points, but instead of using the Fibonacci sequence, we use “number of days”. 

e.g. 1 point = 1 day of effort

This has been a much easier way to quantify effort and help you manage your capacity during sprints.

Why?

You can share your bandwidth more visually by using this figure to help you prioritise work with your team or design manager if you are over your work capacity.

ℹ️ Total “work capacity” is about 70–80% of the whole sprint. Why? We leave room for meetings, admin, and random things that might pop up.

e.g. a bi-weekly sprint is ten days, so you should have around 7 to 8 days of work capacity.

The example below shows how JSW calculates the number of days of work I have in a bi-weekly sprint: “I have 5.5 days worth of work.”

☑️ Hal recommends using this multiplier to estimate your story points.

High confidence x1
Medium confidence x1.5
Low confidence x2

e.g. medium confidence for a research study and the estimate is five days, then times by 1.5 to get 7.5 days as your final estimate.

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🏃‍♂️ Running your sprints

Most scrum experts recommend starting on Wednesday but starting at the beginning of the week and finishing at the end of the week connected better with our workflow. But it’s really up to the teams to decide this as they know what cadence works best.

Sprint planning

ℹ️ 1-hour planning session that is async and done individually

1) Break up your tasks to fit within your given sprint (e.g. weekly, bi-weekly, etc.)

2) Evaluate whether unfinished tasks should go into your next sprint or move to the Backlog

3) Review your capacity and priority for the following sprint(s)

• Must do: If a task is Major or more, then that’s what you should work on first. “I have to get finished during this sprint.”
• Can do: If a task is Minor or less, it doesn’t need to be completed during this sprint. “I can afford to move it to the next sprint.”

4) Pull tasks into the new sprint based on priority and capacity

☑️ Hal recommends adding these notes to a calendar invite so you don’t forget what you need to do.

Stand-up

I keep stand-up as straightforward as possible to reduce stress and overhead.

Responsibilities

Recap

I look at the top three sidebar items in the following way. It helps me keep track of where my focus needs to be.

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😃 Work smart, not hard

By allowing myself to work in this way, I’ve had the opportunity to spend more time on other areas of design. It has given me a chance to deliver constantly, on time, and without burning myself out. You can use any method, really. The critical part is to use a system that helps you communicate how long a task will take, when it will be completed, and how much you can do within a given period. I just found that Jira Software ticks all the boxes for me and helps keep me focused on the important things — designing!

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📝 What version of Jira Software do I use?

1. Scrum template — You need sprints to break up your work and allow you to timebox tasks. e.g. how much can I get done in two weeks?
2. Team-managed version — The company-managed version is quite complex, and there are too many settings for a designer to contend with. The team-managed version allows you to get started with little setup fuss and keeps things simple.

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Appendix

Illustration: https://storyset.com/