How Mehrwert uses Tempo Capacity Planner for planning and team capacity
Tempo Team
Background
Mehrwert is an agency working primarily in the fields of design and technology, covering everything from brand and UI to technical consultancy and CMS with TYPO3.
Initially founded by four friends having studied design in Cologne, Germany in 1998, Mehrwert steadily grew to the size it is today. To date, their team consists of dozens of different roles ranging through design and copy to technical specialities like server specialists and developers.
We were happy to chat with Reiner Sunkel, a business unit manager at Mehrwert. Sunkel is responsible for all operations within his unit, including capacity planning and project management. He is also a member of the management board and makes strategic decisions concerning his unit and the whole organization.
The Mehrwert team works in both agile and traditional project management and they discovered Tempo Capacity Planner after reading all about it on our blog when they started using it in early 2014.
Challenges
When we asked Sunkel about what challenges his organization was facing before turning to Tempo Capacity Planner, he said that they had:
Non-transparent planning activities within separate teams leading to multiple problems. Project managers had different statuses on project plans on different computers by not having real-time information available for all team members.
Difficulties calculating availability for team members and making sure they weren’t overloaded. They experienced painful trials trying to change.
Before implementing Tempo Capacity Planner within their organization, Mehrwert tried multiple different tools and combinations before eventually deciding to go for Planner.
Having used Tempo Capacity Planner since it’s initial launch in early 2014, Sunkel had this to say about the product:
“Tempo Capacity Planner has given our team members the ability to plan different projects with different teams consisting of different people with a different amount of available time and make all of this transparent. Gaining viable information early and increasing the chance to adapt to changes early.”
Solutions
Mehrwert organizes employees into the following teams:
Design
Technology
Project manager
Freelance
Almost everybody is a 100% member of one team or a 50% team member if they have different roles within the organization. People can also drop in and out of other teams depending on projects.
Why is this relevant? Well, some teams can think their organization has too much difference between departments and roles for a single software to help everyone, but that wasn’t the case for Mehrwert and Sunkel’s teams.
So how have they been working in Capacity Planner? Well, what Capacity Planner does is Planner is plan the time of your individual team members. It creates visualizations of resources, inidvidual workload, highlights bottlenecks, and can even provide insights into where you may need extra hires.
Most of the planning done at Mehrwert is done on the Team Members Timeline, they reserve time for certain projects by planning on the timeline. Whether it’s a new project, maintaining an ongoing project or anything else.
Once they’ve made their plans on the Team Members Timeline, they navigate over to the Team Capacity Report to make sure that team members are not under/overloaded.
This gives the teams transparency, flexibility, and allows them to have a secure look into future workload for different teams and the whole organization. These features allow them to do team planning, resource planning, and capacity planning.
In the future, Sunkel mentioned that they also plan on working more with the open API’s in Tempo Capacity Planner and the program features.
Results
When asked what the biggest change within the organization has been since they started using Tempo Capacity Planner, Sunkel said:
“Everybody is able to say for certain what he's supposed to work on. Even if all project managers are unavailable, the teams would be able to exactly say what they were supposed to do. At least for the near future.
“Also everyone knows what the other team members are working on. Even if they are in a different team and/or if they different working days. Plus all members of the board are able to see the workload in a certain time in the future without requesting a report.”
But what about the employees?
When we asked Sunkel how his team members have taken to the implementation of Tempo Capacity Planner, he said:
“Without a survey to back up my words I'd say our team members like Tempo Capacity Planner a lot. I know for certain that this is the opinion of everyone involved in project planning at mehrwert and every new employee seemed to be impressed when it's presented on his/her first day at Mehrwert when the tools we use are introduced.“
At Mehrwert, they have also adopted Timesheets by Tempo and are currently evaluating Tempo Budgets as well for their business needs.