Jira Align integration: Easily calculate development investments

As priorities constantly shift in light of macroeconomic trends, understanding how development costs are allocated across your product portfolios is crucial. With Timesheets' integration with Jira Align, product leaders can effortlessly assess development investments against strategic themes — all without the administrative hassle. As a longstanding and trusted time-tracking partner for Atlassian, we’re thrilled that Tempo was chosen as the go-to for Jira Align, its agile solution for large enterprise teams. Kyle Foreman, Jira Align Product Manager at Atlassian, couldn't be happier about the collaboration: “We are pleased to provide our Jira Align customers with a seamless data connection to automatically calculate team time investments across their product portfolios. Tempo is a top time-tracking marketplace partner for Atlassian, so it was a straightforward decision to work with them on this integration for Jira Align and give leaders the insights they need to effectively plan.”

What is Jira Align and how does it work with Timesheets?

For those new to Jira Align, here's a quick primer: Atlassian's Jira Align is a cloud-based enterprise agile planning solution, tailor-made for managing large-scale software and IT projects.

We love it because it coordinates the work of multiple teams towards achieving common objectives set by the organization, and it’s purpose-built for the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™). With the Timesheets integration, you can maintain agility while controlling costs.

Our integration provides the data you need to answer essential questions, such as:

• How much does it cost for my teams to develop and maintain every product?

• Are our developers spending time on projects aligned with our organization's strategic initiatives?

• Where should we invest more developer resources?

With a better understanding of how time is invested, you're able to plan, budget, and track developer investments more accurately. These timely insights will also help you to quickly prevent misaligned work from draining your resources. Plus, by understanding your developers' capacity, you can better manage their time, prioritize tasks, and take advantage of potential opportunities.

How does the integration work?

As work is completed by your teams in Jira, the Timesheets integration with Jira Align seamlessly aggregates time data from Jira stories and multiplies it by an hourly rate. There are two options when setting the hourly rate:

1. A blended rate: where the portfolio sets a blended spend rate by PI or Time Period.

2. An individual's hourly rate: this applies to each person working in your Jira system.

Spend hours are automatically rolled up and presented in the Accepted Spend column on the main Work Spend dashboard in your Jira Align Portfolio Room.

Now you're able to see how much a project, product, or portfolio has cost to develop (no need to spend hours gathering data). Plus, the single view allows you and your financial team to track developer spend against set budgets.

By using the Timesheets for Jira Align integration, you're able to demonstrate to your board and investors that development spend is connected to your organization's strategic investment themes.

How to get the integration

➡️ Are you a Jira Align user but not a Timesheets customer yet? No problem. Head over to the Atlassian marketplace or contact your Atlassian Solution Partner, who will help you with the next steps.

➡️ Already using both Timesheets and Jira Align? Great! Contact Tempo Support to enable the integration for Cloud.

➡️ Have questions about Jira Align, the enterprise planning solution for Jira? Learn more on Atlassian’s Jira Align page.