What Are Story Points?
Story Points represent the weight or complexity of a task and are designed to help teams estimate the amount of effort required to accomplish it. They serve multiple purposes, such as:
Comparing Task Efforts: Understand how the effort for one task stacks up against another, helping prioritize and allocate resources.
Planning Milestone Efforts: Estimate the total effort needed to achieve a Milestone by summing the Story Points of individual tasks.
Resource Allocation: Track the total effort assigned to a team member over a given period, ensuring that workload distribution is balanced.
How Story Points Work
Task-Level Assignment: Story Points are assigned at the task level to quantify the effort required for that specific task.
Milestone and User-Level Summation: Once Story Points are assigned to individual tasks, they are automatically summed at both the Milestone and User levels. This allows managers to see the total effort required for a Milestone or the workload assigned to a team member.
Custom Definitions: While Story Points often correlate to one day of work, teams are free to define what a single point represents. This flexibility allows for more accurate planning, whether a Story Point equates to hours, days, or another metric.
Fractional Story Points: You can assign fractional Story Points (e.g., 1.5 points) to better represent tasks that require more nuanced effort estimates.
Capacity Planning: By defining an individual's Story Point capacity, you can ensure that no team member is overburdened. For instance, if a member has a weekly capacity of 5 Story Points, you can distribute tasks accordingly to avoid overload.
Use Case: Optimizing Resource Planning with Story Points
Imagine your team is working on a new product launch, and you've broken down the project into tasks and Milestones. By assigning Story Points to each task, you can:
Balance Workloads: Sum the Story Points for each team member to ensure no one is overwhelmed with too many complex tasks at once.
Milestone Tracking: By summing Story Points for all tasks under a Milestone, you can forecast the total effort required and adjust timelines if needed.
Effort Estimation: Use Story Points to compare the complexity of tasks, helping prioritize which should be tackled first and allocating resources where they are most needed.
Setting Story Points on a Task
By assigning points to tasks, your team can understand the "weight" of each task in relation to other tasks, as well as in relation to member's workloads.
Assigning Story Points to a Task
Story Points account for the amount of work that needs to be done, the complexity in that work and any risk associated with completing it. The Story Points field in the task will allow you to set the number of points for the task.
The points assigned to a Task will also be attributed in full to each assignee of the task (more on this later in the article).
Tracking Milestone Progress based on Story Points
Milestones will aggregate the amount of Story Points assigned to the open and completed tasks within it. In this way, a milestone provides two reporting metrics:
A percentage of completed tasks by count (reflected as the milestone progress bar)
The fraction indicating the amount of open and completed points assigned to Tasks
Using Story Points to Track and Plan Resources
Story Points not only assist in planning milestones and sprints, as they're a valuable tool in understanding the weight (and not just the amount) of tasks assigned to members within the Workspace.
Configuring and Tracking Story Point Capacity in Workloads
Story Points and Workloads work together seamlessly to help manager's plan and track resource distribution over given periods of time. To maximize this value, start by assigning a Story Point Capacity to members of the Workspace.
Assigning Story Point Capacity
A member's capacity can be assigned from their Profile screen which can be easily accessed by clicking on a member's avatar in the Workloads screen found within Reporting.
1. Start by selecting the member whose capacity you're looking to set.
2. From within their Profile, input the daily point capacity and select Save.
When you return to Workloads, you'll now see the amount of completed points over the amount of assigned points in a given period of time. Additionally, below that member is a progress bar of their Story Point completion.
Story Point FAQs
> Why is 1 point commonly used as 1 day of work?
Tasks without start dates will reflect a duration equal to their amount of points in Workloads. So a task with 3 points will appear to last 3 days assuming no start date is given. Start dates override the Story Point duration in Workloads.
> Will Nifty prevent me for assigning over capacity?
While a member's capacity will appear in red once it is exceeded, Nifty will not prevent you from assigning beyond one's capacity.
> Can I remove weekends from my Workloads?
The Workspace Owner can disable Weekends from calendar and timeline views (which will also remove them from Workloads) from the Localization tab of the Workspace Control center.
> Do points split amongst assignees?
A Story Point is attributed in full to all assignees of a Task, with no option to distribute these points at this time.