Tempo Budgets 11.0 is here!
Before we get into what’s new in this exciting release, we’re very proud to announce that we’ve rebranded Tempo Folio and it will, as of today, be known as Tempo Budgets for JIRA.
As an agile budgeting tool, we believe that this name better describes the functionality of the product and will help our current and potential customers understand its use.
Don’t worry, though, it is still the same product with the same functionalities just with the following updates.
This release focuses on improving the customer experience
The name change is only a small part of improving the customer experience. We’ve also vastly updated the UI by reworking the folio and portfolio overview screens and adding new summaries to the staff, costs, and revenue section.
To top it all off, we’ve also added the ability to add folio and portfolio gadgets to your JIRA or Confluence dashboards to make budgeting in JIRA even better.
Reworked folio and portfolio overview screens
We’re constantly getting feedback from our customers about how to make our products even better. One of the themes of our feedback is that Tempo Folio was a hard product to learn and that the overviews a bit too daunting.
We’ve been listening to what you had to say and one of the ways we’ve decided to respond is by re-working and decluttering the folio and portfolio overviews for Tempo Budgets. They are now easier to understand and provide key information in more a simplified way.
The new overview is broken into 4 parts.
- At the top, traffic lights give a quick and clear indication of project health.
- Underneath, progress bars show how much work has been done.
- There is a small finance section, which has been greatly simplified.
- The complex charts and diagrams are gone and instead we’ve added simple bar charts to indicate how planned, actual, and earned costs and revenue are doing in real-time.
Note that the earned value will only show up if your folio is using EVM and the revenue section, if you’re tracking revenue.
At the bottom, you get a quick indication of how many staff members you have allocated to the folio or portfolio.
Summaries of staff, costs, and revenue
It’s great to get a quick and visual overview of folios and portfolios, but we also wanted you to get a slightly more detailed summary of staff, costs, and revenue without having to dig through a list of entries.
Our answer to that is a brand new summary tab in the staff, costs, and revenue sections.
This view gives you the critical information needed to make quick decisions, without needing to go into detail. If you need more information, simply navigate into the other tabs to drill down further.
Staff summary
The staff summary shows you how many people are allocated to the folio or portfolio and how many hours they’ve worked. It also shows the average hourly rate of all members and indicates if anyone is overloaded.
The bar chart provides:
- A visual indication of the budgeted effort
- Remaining issues within the project’s scope
- Remaining availability of the members.
Toggle over to the planned effort to only see what was planned.
Costs summary
The new costs summary has a traffic light at the top showing the cost variance and indicating if you’re on target or over budget. Below that you get information about the planned versus actual costs and the delta. The progress bars show the progress in terms of planned costs as well as earned value (if you’re using EVM).
The new revenue summary is similar to the costs summary, but shows the data for revenue. Since it’s almost the same, it’s not shown here.
Folio and portfolio gadgets
Your work lives in JIRA and Confluence and we want our customers to get the necessary data from Tempo Budgets in the easiest way possible.
In order to do that, we also added the ability to add folio and portfolio gadgets to your JIRA or Confluence dashboards. Go no further and get a quick indication of project health.
To add a gadget to JIRA, simply click on “add gadget” from your JIRA dashboard and either scroll down to see the folio and portfolio gadgets for Tempo Folio, or search for them and then click add.
I’ve chosen to add the portfolio overview gadget to my dashboard. Once you’ve added it, you can customize exactly what you’d like to see.
I chose to add the progress and finance, here’s what it looks like:
Get a quick indication of how your folio or portfolio is doing without even needing to go into Tempo Budgets. Identify if things are over budget more quickly and make changes before they become a larger issue.
Other improvements
Reschedule folios
Plans change and projects sometimes get delayed, or start earlier than planned. To help you better deal with that reality, Tempo Budgets now allows you to reschedule your existing folios, giving you the option to move planned expenses and efforts accordingly.
We hope that you are as excited about the new name and UI as we are.
As always, feel free to get in touch with any feedback you might have.
