Photo by: Axel Rafn Benediktsson
Volume Four July 28, 2014 Your Free Copy
THE
TEMPO
TIMES
AGILE SOLUTIONS THAT MATTER
Author: Jessie VanderVeen
“Each of our agile
software add-ons
for JIRA can be
used alone or in
tandem with one
another.“
T
empo is an award winning creator of agile software add-ons for Atlassian’s popular project and issue tracking platform, JIRA, and its agile component, JIRA Agile. Our team’s existence came to be out of a need to build agile solutions for real problems faced by actual users—our own at TM Software. We strive to build and implement fully robust, flexible tools that harness powerful business data for efficiency and optimal decision making.Tempo Timesheets
Think time tracking isn’t agile? Think again! We built our flexible time tracking and reporting solution to seamlessly integrate with JIRA because we needed to easily measure our teams’ efficiency. We thought we’d use it primarily for customer billing and internal payroll purposes, but the solution brought us so much more, including forecasting and analysis capabilities, to help us continually refine and maximize our efforts. Time tracking means getting things done!
Tempo Planner
Flexible resource planning for your teams, projects, and programs is now possible with our Tempo Planner solution for JIRA. Used along with JIRA Agile, Tempo Planner optimizes sprint, release, and epic planning, keeping everyone on the same page and end goals in sight. Tempo Planner’s real-time data helps
businesses reflect and confidently forecast for the future. Transparency, flexibility, and efficiency mean greater overall cost savings.
Tempo Books
Our new Tempo Books solution helps organizations allocate budgets spent on projects, designate rates, and manage actual costs and expenses for client billing, giving a whole new meaning to tracking value in JIRA. Gain peace of mind with data that matters and insights into overall program and portfolio health, alleviating your reliance on multiple spreadsheets and other external tools. Get the big picture and access to the details for informed decision making.
Tempo Attendance
Tempo Attendance, our newest solution for JIRA, is a personnel information tool that provides businesses with a quick overview of staff presence at any given time, helping to build smoother communication and collaboration among your teams. Get information if team members are in the office, working remotely, or otherwise unavailable. Customizable statuses let team members communicate with their teams more effectively.
Tempo’s Agile Portfolio Solutions
Each of our agile software solutions for JIRA can be used alone or in tandem with one another for full product and professional services solutions working at all levels of your business. Our products aim at helping organizations work smarter, period. The more you use together, the more value added. Maximize your results today with Tempo.
Try our solutions for free on the Atlassian Marketplace: www.marketplace.atlassian.com
AN AGILE STORY
T
his year marks our first foray into the Agile Conference realm, and we’re thrilled to be participating. As champions of Agile methodologies since our very beginning, our presence has been long overdue.Tempo’s existence came to be out of a need to build Agile solutions for real problems faced by real users—our own at TM Software. Back in 2006, TM Software implemented Atlassian’s popular JIRA platform throughout our company. The developers on our custom web solutions teams loved JIRA, but were using an external platform to plan and track their time spent for client billing purposes, as well as for internal payroll calculations. As a company that embraces Agile methodologies, this created a lot of hassle, headaches, wasted time, and even the possibility for inaccuracies. We needed a time tracking and planning solution that was so tightly integrated with JIRA, it felt like a part of the platform. We also wanted to see how we used our time and whether we might improve our efficiency or better allocate our resources, and we needed reliable data to help us with those endeavors.
Initially, a handful of developers at TM Software was assigned to build our time tracking plugin—now known as our Tempo Timesheets add-on—we so badly needed, and launched it for internal purposes. We ended up liking to the solution we built so much,
realized there simply wasn’t a comparable solution available on the market, and launched it externally one year later with notable success.
Today, Tempo has more than 5,000 customers in over 100 countries, and is continually growing with sales conducted primarily through Atlassian’s Marketplace, an online marketplace for Atlassian add-ons, as well as through our more than 50 global partner resellers. Our customers include both startups and large-scale distributed enterprises with over 10,000 Tempo users, and include the likes of eBay, Amazon, BMW, Dow Jones, Intel, Sony, MTV, AT&T, and more.
Tempo Timesheets was voted the #1 Atlassian add-on of 2012 by Atlassian, and was the top-grossing Atlassian Marketplace add-on for the 2013 fiscal year. As a result of our initial successes, we’ve had the opportunity to shift our efforts forward, focusing on solving additional problems faced by our customers as well as ourselves at TM Software.
We’ve often heard that time tracking is incompatible with being Agile. We disagree. We built Tempo Timesheets, as well as our new Tempo Planner and our (soon-to-be-released) Tempo Books and Tempo Attendance add-ons for JIRA so that we can be Agile, transparent, efficient, and successful, and we’ve been able to accomplish these very things with each of these products.
Our team’s primary objective has been to create fully robust project and portfolio management solutions that help businesses work smarter and more efficiently, including our own. We use our add-ons internally throughout our company, from our development and marketing teams to our C-level executives,
and depend on the quality and usability of our products as much as we imagine each customer does.
We feel the goodwill that Tempo has garnered over the last five years is a result of the relatability of our products and our continued responsiveness to user feedback. From the very beginning, we’ve sought to build Agile business solutions that keep our customers nimble, organized, and making the best strategic decisions, and we cannot do that without the generous input of our users. From our desktops to yours, we hope our products serve your needs as well as they have served our own.
Stay tuned—there’s more good stuff to come! Learn more about Tempo:
www.tempoplugin.com
Author: Águst Einarsson, CEO, TEMPO
Ágúst Einarsson
CEO, TEMPO
“Today, Tempo has more than
5,000 customers in over 100
countries, and is continually
growing...”
The Tempo Times
Tempo
Borgartún 37
105 Reykjavík
Iceland
Published by:
The Tempo Team
Printed by:
Ísafold
Editor:
Jessica VanderVeen
Layout
Þórður Grímsson
Contributors:
Ágúst Einarsson
Bjarki Óskarsson
Jessica VanderVeen
Ragnar Egilsson
The Tempo Team:
Ágúst Einarsson Anna Vigdís Rúnarsdóttir Arnar Freyr Magnússon Árni Fannar Þráinsson Árni Freyr Snorrason Árni Reynir Óskarsson Arnþór Snær Sævarsson Axel Davíð Ingólfsson Baldur Þór Emilsson Benedikt Bjarni Bogason Bjarki Óskarsson Bjarni Þorbjörnsson Björn Orri Guðmundsson Eiríkur Ari Pétursson Emma Rún Bjarnadóttir Eric Nielsen
Ester Anna Pálsdóttir Gísli Hrafnkelsson Guðleifur Kristjánsson Haukur Stefánsson Jessica Vanderveen Jón Egill Gíslason Jón Þór Árnason Kristín Hreinsdóttir Kristján Eldjárn Þóroddsson Lúðvík Snær Hermannsson Malte Bjarki Mohrmann Marinó Fannar Pálsson Patrick Thomas Pétur Ágústsson Ragnar Egilsson Rúnar Guðbjartsson Sandra Björg Axelsdóttir Sigrún Arna Sigurðardóttir Sonja Bára Gunnarsdóttir Susanne Barbara Götz Sverrir Tynes Tómas Magnússon Viðar Svansson Þórður Grímsson Þórunn Día Óskarsdóttir
3
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Volume IV
I
n today’s fast- paced business world, many organizations face the challenge of having their teams distributed in different offices around the globe. Effective communication among teams is vital for businesses to succeed, but geographical distances often make it difficult to keep everyone on the same page. Connecting distributed teams, regardless of time and place, is possible with our Agile Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Planner solutions for JIRA and JIRA Agile.Define teams, workloads, and project scopes
A basic premise of any team is that they’re working together to achieve a common goal. That’s why effective team management is such an important part of any team’s success. With Tempo’s new Teams features—available in both our Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Planner add-ons—users can harness the value of JIRA and JIRA Agile in one centralized place, attributing projects and sprints to specific teams, and dividing work among team members, including stories, tasks, sub tasks, and other work items. Grouping users together ultimately makes team management more transparent and efficient, helping teams successfully keep track of their projects and releases.
Calculate team capacity for sprints and releases in real-time
Many team leads face the hassle of calculating team capacity using multiple tools, which makes the process complicated, time consuming, and in some instances, a liability. Superfluous spreadsheets team meetings, phone calls, and emails to plan ahead can now be a thing of the past.
Harnessing information from JIRA and JIRA Agile, Tempo Planner enables you to validate your team’s capacity and keep everyone in sync. Once a team is assigned to a project or an agile board, Tempo Planner guides you through the story points and tasks that need to be accomplished for your next release. If your team is over or under planned, circle back to your agile board, and add or remove from the backlog as needed.
Calculating team capacity when people are away from work or in different locales can be tricky and delay a project’s progress. Tempo Planner’s workload and holiday schemes enable businesses with distributed teams to set up multiple schemes according to expected team member workloads, incorporating holidays and other time off. Team leads can quickly see who is in the office, view the expected capacity of each team member in real-time, and react to any sudden changes.
Knowing plans and priorities can often change, Tempo Planner’s Planning Timeline empowers teams to easily view unfinished tasks, while team leads can fine -tune the scope of a project or sprint, and adjust team resources as the project gets underway.
Track how your team spends its time
Time tracking is not just about awareness: it’s about change. When you realize how you spend your time, tracking time makes clear where your team’s priorities are—or ought to be—and it shows you how you might make that time better match your priorities.
Through its seamless integration with JIRA, Tempo Timesheets enables users to easily keep track of how their time is spent, and determine how best to manage and inspire team behavior to meet your business goals. Distributed team members can log their time spent working on
JIRA issues no matter where they are located around the globe. Tempo’s workload and holiday schemes mean that team leads can quickly visualize team member workloads and availability directly from the Team Timesheets views.
Tempo Teams can be comprised of several different workload schemes, which makes accounting for independent contractors, part- time employees, or employees with different weekend schedules easy. Users can aggregate JIRA and Tempo data using Tempo Timesheets’ reporting features, and export to an external system for further use with Tempo APIs.
Chart your team’s progress
• Account for team capacity.
Keeping an accurate track of team progress means knowing what’s working and what isn’t, and implementing changes before problems escalate. Tempo Planner’s Team Capacity Report gives team leads an overview of their team’s planned time, and can be broken down by day, week, month, or quarter, allowing you to glance at imminent tasks or further down the road. Plans can be viewed in real -time, enabling team leads to determine if their team members have been over or under-allocated. Plan items can be adjusted with easy drag -and- drop features and other direct on- screen interactions. Future what- if scenarios can be gleaned, and anticipated hires or new team members can be accounted for with longer-term
planning options.
• Chart your team’s estimated versus actual progress.
Team reporting is possible with Tempo Timesheets, which breaks down all estimated and worked-on issues performed on a project during a given timeframe. Reports can be viewed by day, week, month, or a custom period, so team leads can determine whether work is going as planned, where shortages exist, and where additional efforts should be focused. Reports are also available for team members, projects, customer accounts, or issues. Get a breakdown of all billable hours for customer invoicing.
Reflect
No matter how fantastic a Scrum team is, there is always opportunity to improve. Although a good Scrum team will continually look for improvement opportunities, the sprint retrospective is a great time for the team to deliberately reflect on how things are going, and to find ways to improve for the next iteration. Tempo’s robust data can help teams reflect and better plan for the future.
Learn more: www.tempoplugin.com
Author: Bjarki Oskarsson
CONNECTING DISTRIBUTED
AGILE TEAMS WITH TEMPO
“Time
tracking is
not just about
awareness.
It’s about
change.”
1. Manage your resources (time, people, money, process) efficiently and accurately.
Manage time effectively. Time tracking means getting things done. Track your team time to easily assess how time is being used or misused, and to modify behavior accordingly.
Manage team capacity and commitment, now and in the future. Spot issues early on and make the necessary course corrections before they escalate.
Manage financial resources in real-time. Assess the value of your projects and their
performance as they happen. Make future projections based on current data. Manage your project and team operations. Determine which processes are working or not working, and make requisite adjustments as needed.
2. Make good, strategic decisions about what matters, when it matters most.
Employ reporting and data collection tools that aggregate useful business information in real-time pertaining to your teams, projects, accounts, customers, or agile boards when making your most important decisions.
Access current and historical data to help make accurate future business projections.
3. Get more done in less time.
Stay organized. Keep your teams, projects, accounts, and releases on track and on time.
Prioritize well. Discern what needs to be accomplished and dive into the most important tasks first.
Don’t wait. Execute your plans. Use practical business data help you move forward.
4. Communicate well.
Efficient coordination and automation of delivery processes require new, collaborative approaches to planning, measuring, execution, control, and reporting of activities.
Communicate plans effectively with those who need to know them.
Convey and manage expectations and priorities with others.
Provide support for collaboration across roles brought on by the adoption of agile practices and distributed teams.
SMARTER.
5
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Volume IV
5. Be flexible.
Easily adapt and pivot as needs, resources, or priorities change.
Maintain a flexible, yet manageable workflow that involves multiple roles on a project or team level.
Deal with and adapt to complex requirements with variant degrees of difficulty.
6. Learn from the past (on your path to the future).
Trace, report, and account for successes and failures.
Discern what should be different next time.
Tempo’s suite of JIRA solutions help you drive these initiatives.
Work smarter. Learn how.
www.tempoplugin.com
2
3
O
ur Tempo Planner add-on for JIRA is being developed at a rapid pace these days with a steady flow of exciting new updates and releases. At Tempo, we have implemented Agile methodologies throughout our product development, marketing, and operations teams, and are confident in the value added to our organization. With our recent releases of Tempo Planner, we’ve introduced new and improved features for program planning that even better facilitate these processes.With Tempo Planner, a program consists of a group of teams that are associated with a certain project or agile board within JIRA Agile. Program planning is the process of managing several related projects, with the intention of improving an organization’s performance. Until now, it has been difficult to harness all related planning information into one centralized place for efficiency and effective decision-making. With Tempo Planner’s new program planning features, this process is simplified considerably, facilitating an increase in transparency and performance for teams.
Team leads can now perform high-level planning on their teams within a program in JIRA. Tempo Planner’s program view is divided into two sections, the Program Backlog, and the Program Roadmap, to facilitate this process. Here’s how:
Program Backlog
With Tempo Planner’s new Program Backlog space, team leads can easily associate teams to specific projects within their organization. (In Tempo’s Teams Space, teams can already be linked to projects and agile boards, providing quick access to all running projects within the program). This enables team leads to prioritize features, backlogs, and architectural epics at a higher program level before they are delegated to specific teams and team members. Tempo’s program management functionality is intended to ameliorate the difficulties that many businesses face in centralizing all program-related planning informations.
The Program Backlog consists of epic and the teams associated with their backlog. Tempo Planner Backlog view allows users to see the prioritized backlogs for individual teams within the program. Team leads can manage work packages or epics for each team by dragging items from the program backlog to the team backlog. Moving epics to add them to one of the teams or to rank them within a backlog is simple. Epics can also be dragged-and-dropped between teams or back to the backlog. Team member avatars display above each team backlog, as well as the team’s name, which is an active link to the team’s summary page containing additional information.
Program Roadmap
Our Tempo Planner team has been diligently working on our Program Roadmap features, which help you match your short-term and long-term goals with solutions to help you meet those objectives. They provide a mechanism to help you forecast future developments, and a framework with which you can visually plan and coordinate for those developments. With these new features, teams can flexibly plan at a higher level in conjunction with how your development process is likely to evolve.
The Tempo Planner’s Program Roadmap displays all anticipated releases in the program, and offers an easy mechanism to schedule them. All users gain an overview of the main deliverables for each release and the epics and JIRA issues contained within them. The Program Roadmap displays epics as a part of a JIRA project version on the Planner Timeline. The roadmap shows all JIRA projects along with their versions, which are linked to the teams that are part of the program. Each release can be expanded in the program roadmap to get an overview of the main deliverables in each release by viewing the epics in the release. View high-level details about each delivery, and manage start and release dates inline.
These new program planning features add a new perspective to Tempo Planner, helping team members stay on the same page and working towards the same set of objectives.
Learn more about Agile Program planning with Tempo Planner for JIRA and JIRA Agile:
www.tempoplugin.com
Author: Bjarki Óskarsson
AGILE PROGRAM PLANNING
WITH TEMPO PLANNER
“Program
planning is
the process of
managing several
related projects,
with the intention
of improving an
organization’s
performance.”
“Team leads can
now perform
high-level
planning on their
teams within a
program
in JIRA.”
7
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Volume IV
W
ith Tempo Planner’s seamless integration with JIRA and JIRA Agile, you can move beyond spreadsheets and sticky notes, flexibly managing your sprints, backlogs, releases, and even long-term roadmaps with ease. Tempo Planner helps you:• Plan for your people, teams, projects, and programs • Keep track of your iterations, stories, tasks,
and defects
• Manage your backlog for better performance and delegation
• Perform high-level and granular capacity planning for releases and roadmaps
• Visualize your plan health status • Teach and reinforce Agile concepts
Plan and report flexibly
Plan work for your people, teams, projects, and programs directly on Tempo’s Planner Timeline with easy drag-and-drop features and other direct on-screen interactions. Plan and report on projects by the capacity, utilization, project, and specialties of your employees. Add plan items to track statuses, update tasks, and work with your team.
Visualize plans in real-time
Quickly visualize the capacity and availability of your teams and individual team members in one centralized space. Tempo’s Planner Timeline allows you to take into account vacations, holidays, and flexible employee working hours, keeping everyone on the same page.
Manage your iterations with one click
Easily plan iterations for your team and see how possible changes in scope, schedule, and team member size might affect your plans going forward. Tempo Planner’s Team Timeline displays a visual line-up of all of your sprints and your team’s capacity. Expand sprint items on the Planner Timeline to display detailed information regarding work items and sub-items. Manage assignments within your iterations based on team member capacity, ensuring a balanced workload of your team.
Plan and add stories to your iterations
Drag stories and defects from your backlog into your iterations. View color-coded resource indicators that display how much capacity remains within each iteration. Split and delete plan items with one click. Create recurring items for longer-term planning.
Prioritize your backlog
Release planning is easy with Tempo Planner. Create your backlog by adding stories or tasks with one click. Edit them easily in place and prioritize with drag-and-drop options.
Track plan health on the fly
Know what’s happening with your projects no matter where you are in the world. View the status of each program, project, release, epic, story, and task, what is still to be completed, and whether anything is blocked. Customize your view by team, project, agile board, filter, or timeframe, depending on your planning focus. Use Tempo Planner’s Team Capacity Report for a quick visual assessments of team capacity calculations.
Manage your long-term roadmaps
Tempo Planner lets you quickly visualize your scheduled projects and team member availability for longer-term roadmap planning. Gain peace of mind with easy-to-use features and functionality that lessen your reliance on spreadsheets and other data-crunching platforms. Get the big picture (and the details) with Tempo’s reliable real-time data for informed and confident decision making.
Integrate with Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Books
Maximize the return on your investments with the value added of time and budget management. Add Tempo Timesheets and track your team’s time for billing, internal salary calculations, and measuring capitalization costs. Use Tempo Planner with Tempo Books to manage costs and expenses associated with your projects and releases for future planning needs, and to make future projections.
Integrate with other business applications
Use Tempo Planner’s API and integrate with your favorite (or even custom-made) business applications for boundless solutions.
Get started today with Tempo Planner for JIRA and JIRA Agile.
Try for free on the Atlassian Marketplace: www.marketplace.atlassian.com
Author: Jessie VanderVeen
SPRINT AND RELEASE PLANNING
WITH TEMPO PLANNER FOR JIRA
W
ith the recent and upcoming enhancements to the Agile Timesheets and Reports functionality of our Tempo Timesheets add-on for JIRA and JIRA Agile, Scrum teams can browse work and track time on epics, sprints, stories, and JIRA issues (tasks), and even glance at higher-level information regarding your team’s previous and current work.Our Agile Timesheets provide a good way to manage all Tempo Timesheets worklogs associated with JIRA Agile epics and sprints. The Agile Timesheet can display worklogs from one or more (or all) epics, for both Scrum and Kanban boards. Scrum boards can also be refined down by sprints for easy reference. Agile Timesheets can also be viewed for JIRA issues and worklogs, allowing you to get the nitty gritty details. Other visible data on these timesheets include original estimated hours to be worked, the remaining estimated hours, and actual worked hours, allowing team leads to keep track of their teamwork in real-time and help plan for the future. Live links take you quickly back to your agile board or to your Tempo Teams page for more information about your Scrum team, team member capacity and commitment, and overall project data. Further enhancements to our Agile Reports, beginning with our upcoming Tempo Timesheets 7.10 release and beyond, will enable team leads to manage the progress of team efforts based on a selected agile board, project, release, epic, or sprint, including:
Tempo’s recently added Agile Reports take timesheet reports one step further, enabling teams to better visualize graphically the distribution of team efforts based on selected criteria for both current and past work, helping team leads prioritize team work to better reach your goals. While our Tempo Planner add-on places particular emphasis on visualizing, grouping, and managing future work, these enhancements to Tempo Timesheets address current and past work grouping, filtering, and comparisons, solving a number of challenges faced by our JIRA Agile and Tempo Timesheets users.
A host of new time tracking data and reporting tools have been made available or will soon be released for our Tempo Timesheets add-on, allowing customers to pivot data and align your reports, alleviating your reliance on spreadsheets and other external tools. Manage your data in one centralized place, and gain peace of mind with Tempo’s solutions.
Try Tempo Timesheets for free on the Atlassian Marketplace: www.marketplace.atlassian.com
Author: Jessie VanderVeen
STAY ON TRACK WITH AGILE
TIMESHEETS AND REPORTS
• Viewing the current status of estimated versus actual team efforts
• Determining the actual versus remaining efforts of each team member in the current sprints and epics
• Quickly accessing estimated versus actual efforts for past sprints and epics
• Reporting on the progress of each item in a release
• Filtering teamwork reports by a specific time-frame
• Visualizing the efforts and progress of an agile board in real-time • Grouping and filtering worklog
information based on attributes and custom attributes
• Filtering time spent on agile boards by project for overall project and program planning
