Creating custom time commitments in Tempo per team member

Question

Hi there,

I have recently installed the Tempo add-on to simplify some of our Sprint planning and time allocation. Currently, when we plan Sprints, we gather time availability by team member (ex. John has 50 hours to work over the next two weeks) and then add up the hours that that user has committed to in a Google spreadsheet.

My understanding was that Tempo would allow us to streamline and integrate this process. But what I'm finding is that it uses hardcoded values and assumes that everyone in the project has 8 hours a day to work. Here's what I want to do:

1) For a given Sprint, insert custom commitment values per team member

2) Be able to change these values from Sprint to Sprint

3) See the burndown of committed vs. available hours (e.g., if John has 50 hours, and we've booked him for 37 hours, he has 13 available hours left)

Here's what I've tried:

1) Changing the global workload scheme. This allows me to customize the per-day working hours, but that isn't really solving my problem.

2) Changing % availability of a team member on my Tempo team. This also doesn't work well, because team members don't have convenient 25%/50%/75%/100% availability. For example, if John has 50 hours over 2 weeks of a total 80 working hours, then neither 50% nor 75% will work for him.

3) Going into the Tempo timesheet and changing "planned time" values per team member. This also doesn't seem to do anything.

Can I just say: Tempo actually seems like a MORE complicated way to track time. So far, I'm pretty nonplussed with the interface and its convolution. Seems like it could be highly simplified. Literally all I need is a way to insert hours per team member, per Sprint, and then have those values auto-update as we estimate on tickets. Instead, Tempo seems like a behemoth. It does way more than I need it to do. So if Tempo isn't what I should be using (and if JIRA offers some functionality out of the box for this kind of activity) please also let me know.

Thanks!

Henry

Viðar Svansson · Answer

Hi Henry, thank you for the feedback on Tempo Planner.

In order to fully answer your question I would like to know how you calculated the 50 hours for John? The reason I ask is that Planner will be able to calculate this for you so you should not need to first use a spreadsheet and then take the computed values there and insert them into Planner (hence the need for custom commitment values).

First you would have to create a workload scheme that describes the hours John contributes to the company. If he for example works 7 hours a day, then create a scheme for that and add John and others like him to the scheme.

Then you need to tell Tempo about any company holidays. If you onlly operate in one country and all employees get the same holidays (bank holidays), then just modify the default scheme.

Now, Tempo will know how much John is going to be able to work for you. Next you have to add any commitments he has outside of the sprints. So plan his vacations or other duties/projects he has in Planner. Now Tempo will know how much capacity John has for the team.

If you now plan the sprint, then Tempo should be able to tell you that John will have 50 hours for the sprint. You can either plan the sprint on team level and Planner will calculate the capacity of all team members factoring in their general availability and other commitments. We usually have the teams commit 75% of available time to the sprints and Planner calculates the induvidual capacity from that baseline. If you want iduvidual commitments then you need to plan each member directly on the sprint but current version of Planner works best if you plan on team level.

We are working on more flexibility when planning sprints and features to allow you to better visualize capacity VS demand. I hope the instructions above help you plan your sprints without resorting to spreadsheets. If it does not, then I would love to hear more about it so we can solve it in the product.

Best,
Viðar

Sverrir Tynes [1 · Answer

Hi Henry

Thanks for your post. I ll pass this on to the Tempo Planner team and they will answer your questions after the Easter holidays.

Sverrir Tynes
Tempo support