How Tempo Timesheets and Capacity Planner work better together

Jira is a great product, and great products deserve great add-ons. Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Capacity Planner enhance Jira with painless time tracking and agile resource planning and capacity reporting. Together, they provide a comprehensive and scalable solution for crucial business needs.

Whether teams are in New Product Development (NPD) or Professional Services Automation (PSA), they can benefit from leveraging Jira and Tempo to maximize their efforts. So what are the challenges facing these businesses, and how can Tempo’s products address them?

What are the challenges facing new product development?

Developing a new product is often a monumental task, and if a team isn’t using a powerful project management tool to keep track of their projects and processes, then the complexity can quickly overwhelm the team. That’s why it’s essential for an organization to have the right infrastructure to support the development of new products.

It’s not always easy, though. NPD teams must go through several stages in the development process like designing, testing, and releasing. This process can be costly and complex if the right tools and processes aren’t adopted. The aim of those tools should be to make it possible to build the highest quality product for customers.

Another challenge is that many enterprises conduct their operations worldwide and across different regions with team members working in distributed teams. Effective communication between these teams is crucial because inefficiencies can cost an organization time and money. Even an incremental improvement in team communication can help you overtake the competition.

What makes business growth difficult for Professional Services Automation?

PSA businesses face challenges of their own. PSA has many interrelated functions that are needed to ensure successful project delivery and client satisfaction. Resource management, project management, billing, and reporting are frequently divided between multiple systems which can result in inefficient resource allocation, redundant manual processes, and lack of overview for the business.

In the PSA world, it’s optimal for businesses to have a solid centralized tool that can take care of these varying needs, as even the smallest mistake can prove costly. Accurate customer billing is a particularly crucial factor, especially when it comes to maintaining prosperous customer relationships. Clients often need or desire transparent information and to be able to access account data in real time. They need to be assured that projects will be delivered within contract scopes, on schedule, and on budget.

The ultimate goal of any PSA enterprise is to keep employees happy, meet project deadlines and budgets, and keep track of how people and efforts are being distributed within the organization.

Combining Tempo products for greater efficiency and growth

So what’s all this have to do with Tempo? Tempo products can help address the particular challenges faced by both NPD and PSA teams. The features of Tempo products are designed to optimize working processes for all sorts of teams and companies, big and small.

With Capacity Planner, you can:

• Plan for your people, teams, projects, and programs

• Manage your backlog for better performance and delegation

• Perform high-level and granular capacity planning for product releases and program roadmaps

• Connect your distributed teams

• Visualize plan health status in real-time

With Tempo Timesheets, you can:

• Track time on work performed seamlessly within Jira

• Plan and report flexibly for teams, projects, accounts, and more

• Get relevant, real-time business data

• Track internal issues such as vacations, meetings and sick days

• Account for holidays, flexible employee work hours, and distributed teams

Resource planning with Tempo Capacity Planner

Capacity Planner reduces the complexity of building solutions for your customer. With it, you get a clear visual representation of how your team’s effort is being used. The software enables granular planning by projects, versions, and epics to best suit the type of business and the work at hand.

Related article: The Complete 2020 Guide to Resource Planning with Tempo Planner

You also get a detailed overview of team capacity and allocation in real-time with tools like the capacity report. The resource planning view allows you to manage your teams and resources centrally and transparently. Discover how much total time is available for the designated period as well as the time available for each resource.

Tracking time across your teams with Tempo Timesheets

Time tracking is not just about awareness; it’s about change. When you realize how you spend your time, it makes it clear where your team’s priorities are — or ought to be — and it shows you how you might better match that time to your priorities.

Tempo Timesheets adds flexible Jira time tracking capabilities, which help users reduce inaccuracies for customer billing, internal salary calculations, and capitalization measurement.

Tempo Timesheets also compliments Jira with powerful reporting features which empower teams to gain insight into accounts, workflow, resource shortages, cost and profit centers, and more.

With those features, you can report on team members, projects, customer accounts, or issues and get a breakdown of billable hours for the entire team to export them for invoicing. These reports help teams stay on schedule and can also be used for future projections regarding team resources.

Related article: A Beginner’s Guide to Tracking Time in Jira with Tempo Timesheets

Managing distributed teams can be a real hassle with employees working different work schedules, but that’s not a problem with Tempo Timesheets. Tempo’s adaptable workload and holiday schemes enable businesses to easily manage workflows, keeping everyone in sync.

Simplify your account management processes with Tempo Timesheets. Use it for:

• Customer billing

• Tracking internal costs

• Employee payroll

• Measuring project capitalization

• Budgeting

Roll-up internal and customer account information, improve communication, efficiency, and transparency. Tempo Timesheets helps you make the best strategic decisions for your business and investments.

Combining the power of Tempo Timesheets and Capacity Planner

Planner and Timesheets work together to provide a centralized solution that addresses the basic needs of any business in one platform, reducing the need for external tools beyond Jira.

Together the products form an all-in-one solution that enables you to manage product teams directly within their Jira instance, freeing them from tedious and imprecise spreadsheets and other ad-hoc tools. Combined with Jira, these Tempo tools can help you to:

• Take control of work and project complexity

• Prioritize efforts better

• Finish projects on time

• Flexibly manage teams and organizational efforts

• Adapt as needed to deliver value to your organization and your customers.

Paired together, Tempo Planner and Tempo Timesheets help you plan for the road ahead and track the road traveled. If you’re tracking time for a team in Jira while operating without an agile resource and capacity planning tool, then you may have difficulty planning effectively for upcoming epics, projects, and iterations. Planning without a reliable way of tracking time leaves you vulnerable to wasted resources and billing errors.

Pairing Tempo Planner with Tempo Timesheets provides a view of the big picture. The work planned for in Tempo Planner and Jira can easily be turned into tangible, quantifiable worklog data, which can be used to determine where change is needed.

Tempo solutions are ideal for SMEs and large-scale distributed enterprises and Tempo’s flexible pricing options are sure to reflect the needs of a wide variety of businesses. Whether you’re a team member working on the next revolutionary software or a CEO focusing on company growth, you’ll find value in Tempo.

The Jira data center ensures flexibility and high availability for businesses hosting applications in their own data center ensuring that our largest enterprise customers are not without our mission-critical time tracking, planning, budgeting, and portfolio management solutions.

The pièce de résistance: the Planned vs. Actual report

One of the most powerful reports in Tempo is the Planned vs. Actual report, which requires both Timesheets and Planner. With it, team leads can limit unknowns and build more accurate plans for their resources. What the report does is allow you to look at how much time you planned compared to how much time you spent on a given initiative.

Related article: The Planned vs. Actual Report in Jira with Tempo

By regularly running the Planned vs. Actual report over the lifetime of a project, managers can monitor and evaluate how their teams are doing. They can take action to stay on track, such as adding or removing resources.

This report helps managers to monitor the progress of their projects. Based on the numbers collected from the Planned vs. Actual report, they can adjust future forecasts and determine how long projects actually take. Learning to make better estimates opens the door to greater profitability.

Related article: Why We're So Bad at Estimating Time - and How to Solve it in Jira

Book a demo to learn more

To see how Capacity Planner and Tempo Timesheets work better together, book a personalized demo today with a Tempo product expert.