Is it possible to define capacity per Area path in Azure Devops?

Question

Background:

We have 3 teams in one Azure devops project. I would like these teams to be stable, and not shift people around when working on new projects.

Each team work on multiple clients, and we've managed to differentiate the PBIs by area path. Each area path is connected to a specific client.

This way it's been very easy to have 1 sprint planning per team, and also being able to keep these teams intact.

The problem we have atm is that it's unclear how much capacity each member can have on each client. Since capacity is planned per sprint.

The question is: Is there any way to plan capacity per area path? I know there is a way to plan capacity by activity type, but we cannot map activity type to clients and that would be wrong imo.

Example: Team 1 consists of 5 developers.

Each developer is assigned to work on a couple of clients.

When planning the sprint, it's easy to miss the fact that dev 1 should work 20h on client 1 and 20h on client 2. So when PBIs are added to the sprint, we might book dev 1 to work 40h on client 1 and miss client 2 totally.

Answer 1

Capacity is a Team allocation concept. Areas and Iterations are a backlog concept, but they overlap because each Team is assigned one or more Area Paths.

One thing that isn’t obvious in Azure DevOps is that each Team gets its own set of Agile tools. It’s just a different view of the project backlog. Each team/backlog has their own capacity. It’s important to note that the capacity in each backlog is not limited to the members of the team and can also vary each iteration. When creating the “Team” you don’t have to put developers in it.

My suggestion would be to align your Teams per client and assign partial capacity for each developer on each (client) Team. For example, developer #1 is split 50% between client 1 and on client 2, so you’d set their capacity to 20h on both (client) Teams. You would also set up their capacity on the project level (the default Team named after the project) to 40h.

Because the backlog is shared, the sprint view per team will reflect their capacity for that Area Path which would allow you to see an overall allocation at the project level for each developer and to see if they are over allocated per client by toggling the Sprint view to the Client Team. Lots of toggling but it would help to provide insights into which client is being overlooked.