This is a guest post by Emre Toptanci, OBSS Atlassian Team Lead, who recently launched a killer extension for Tempo Planner on the Atlassian Marketplace.
For quite some time, Tempo for Jira has been, and still is, the go-to solution for time tracking and planning-related needs in Atlassian's ecosystem. We, at OBSS, have been both using and promoting Tempo to our customers for a long time, and are always satisfied with the results. It is as clear as day: Tempo has done a great job on this. Now it is time for us to get on board and extend the solution.
As you know, Tempo allows users to make future work plans for your team members, and you can see those plans in their calendars. So far, this has been a manual process. Somebody had to create that plan time manually. In most Jira configurations (and especially in those used for project management), it is common to see fields for work estimation and schedule dates (start and finish dates) on each Jira issue, and some of our customers expressed their need to automate the creation of plans in their calendars. After all, we have all the data we need on Jira issues.
We are happy to announce the availability of our Auto Plan Time for Tempo plug-in for Jira. Auto Plan Time (APT), as the name suggests, automatically creates and updates plans in users' calendars based on information in Jira issues that are assigned to them. Instead of manually creating the plan, APT creates it for you. When something changes dates in Jira issues, APT updates it for you. When something changes dates in Jira issues, APT updates it for you. APT listens to updates not only on dates but also on work estimation as well.
Configuration
Configuration is very simple and straightforward.
First, you select which issue types AutoPlanner should watch. And you add 3 more fields in Jira that are to be used for:
- Plan Start Date
- Plan End Date
- Plan Time (Estimated Effort)
Auto Plan Time in Action
After configuration, all you need to do is create a Jira issue and fill in the required fields.
Then, you will see the auto created plan in your Tempo Timesheets calendar. The value given for estimated effort will be distributed among working days between the start and end dates. Please note that non-working days, as defined in the Tempo Timesheets calendar based on its workload schemes, will be skipped.
Greater Possibilities
One great thing about Auto Plan Time is that it’s always listening for updates on issues; you don't have to trigger a create or update procedure in your post-functions. If any of these fields are updated, your calendar is automatically updated. This makes the plug-in very fast to configure and also allows you to use it with other plug-ins to create even greater value.
One such great potential is with the use of Ceptah Bridge plug-in for Jira. (For those who have not used it yet: Ceptah gives you the ability of bi-directional sync between Jira and MS Project) When you create issues from an MSProject file, it is pretty high odds that they will contain information about work estimates and schedule dates. When you configure APTto use these fields, any project plan pushed from MS Project will be created right away in people's calendars. Hundreds of issues in a snap! You do not need to do anything else. As we all know, project plans tend to change, and when a single task changes it probably has a cascading effect on all tasks after it. Not to worry, when you push the updated plan from MS Project to Jira, APT will update all calendar plan time entries for you.
Conclusion
I believe Auto Plan Time for Tempo is an easy to use, easy to configure tool that will prove itself to be really handy in many scenarios. It is already available for Jira Server on the Atlassian Marketplace (free trials are available!). I hope you like it as much as we do.
