Planning and Tracking Team Time at Discovery Garden

Background

Discovery Garden wished to roll out a Jira-integrated solution that enabled teams to plan, track, and report time seamlessly for human resources, projects, and customer accounts.

Discovery Garden was already using Jira and the Tempo Timesheets add-on, however, the tools were not being used according to best practices or to their full potential, and external Excel spreadsheets were being used to plan team time.

The Challenge

New Verve Consulting was tasked with delivering a solution that included:

• accurate and efficient time tracking according to best practices for each client;
• time tracking on multiple levels: issues, projects, and customer accounts (i.e. work orders/SOWs - multiple per client);
• seamless generation of reports on multiple levels: budgets (e.g. planned v actual), work efforts, team performance, and team utilisation;
• planning of human resources on multiple levels: individuals, teams, issues, projects, and customer accounts;
• seamless management of customer accounts (e.g. time tracking, time and revenue reporting, performance tracking).

Our main challenge was to transition teams from the old method of Excel-based planning to an integrated solution using Tempo Planner. Work also had to be carried out in a different time zone to Discovery Garden who are based in Canada. Clear communication was crucial.

The Solution

Our recommendation involved two main chunks of work:

• to optimise the existing Tempo Timesheets configuration;
• to roll-out a new integrated team-planning solution using Tempo Planner.

Our first task was to set up a list of customers and accounts in Tempo for capturing work orders. Jira screens were updated to expose the new Account field to project managers, account information which was previously captured across a range of custom fields and labels was then migrated to the new setup using a combination of REST API calls and the Tempo CSV account import feature.

Finally, we set about setting up Tempo teams with appropriate roles and % allocations. This laid the foundations for Discovery Garden to later plan team member work assignments correctly, and to establish who was under- and over-allocated.

Our next task was to run a pilot using Tempo Planner. We set about configuring a team plan based on data from the soon-to-be-legacy Excel spreadsheet. This was done at project-level using the timeline grid in Tempo Planner.

Once setup, a number of built-in reports were available for project managers to view, including

• % of time planned per week for each team member;
• number of hours not yet planned per week for each team member.

Categories: Agile

Technologies: Tempo Planner, Tempo Timesheets, Jira Software

"We were looking at getting the most out of our Jira set up and New Verve was a great call. Not only were they able to help us define the right tools and process to improve our project tracking but also did a lot of the heavy lifting."

- John Eden, CEO