Tempo Timesheet and Tempo Planner by Tempo
Navigating multiple spaceships across the galaxy at once is a challenging task. Your success depends on the availability of your resources and the capacity of your crew members to take on work, so how can you ensure both?
The answer is through optimal planning. But plenty of travelers miss the mark. One miscalculation or planning error will not only cost travelers their resources, but also disrupt the experiences of your crew members.
In the real world, operational gaps in workload management and resource planning are quite common. A lot of companies don’t realize that they are not distributing workloads equally among teams.
There are also those who don’t properly track how their tools, supplies, equipment, materials, time, and talent are being used for a project, and may be running at a loss.
A 2020 study revealed that employees‘ perception of workload balance influences their satisfaction. If these issues are left unaddressed, team culture, dynamics, and retention rate can be severely impacted.
Identifying the Problems Sometimes, businesses are not aware that their processes are inefficient. In the context of project management, this could mean they lack insight into the project life cycle and may not have all the right data to support pricing.
Paradine, a global leader among consulting, services, and software companies in product-master data management, was in a similar situation.
Logging work was cumbersome for Paradine’s staff. They initially had to make-do with an ERP system’s plugin that only allowed them to log the amount of time each of them spent on a project.
Then, the project manager would need to export the data to Excel and do further calculations and analysis. It was clear that the plugin’s capabilities were strictly limited.
The ERP system also presented some issues with planning; team members did not have proper visibility into their workload or the ability to prepare themselves for the upcoming project development phase since it was not integrated with Jira.
A project manager would need to send their plans to the teams via a pivoted Excel spreadsheet screenshot, which was highly inconvenient for everyone involved.
With offices in Austria, Romania and Ukraine, and a reliance on Jira to manage workflow, Paradine needed a more integrated and comprehensive way to log work. Not only that, but Paradine also needed to gain insights into how time was spent on each project and what was established – so reporting was a key element.
Starting Off with Tempo Timesheets That’s when Denise Reinagl, IT Project Manager and Jira Admin at Paradine, found Tempo Timesheets. The app allows Paradine’s staff to log work directly from Jira and eliminate manual processes from workload management through its reporting function – a total game changer for the multinational company.
Reinagl said that Tempo’s reporting capabilities, which include filters and sorting options, allowed project managers to really work with the data. As a result, they get a clear overview on what was accomplished by their teams.
Here are other benefits Tempo Timesheet has offered Paradine ever since its implementation in 2014:
- Helped save time when logging work.
- Offered project managers meaningful information through detailed time logs .
- Generated reports quickly and hassle-free.
- Enabled tracking of billable hours.
- Accepted quickly by team members.
- Favored for its customer friendly user interface.
A Helping Hand from Tempo Accounts Paradine also leveraged Tempo Accounts, another Tempo app that offers the ability to track time across multiple teams and multiple projects. It connected Paradine’s accounts to specific projects so that work logs can be assigned to accounts to provide data for reporting and bookkeeping.
With both Tempo apps onboard, Paradine gained significant insights into their time logs and the data captured was much more granular, which meant that project managers had a much more holistic view of the work that was put in.
Gearing Up with Tempo Planner Once its workload management issues were resolved, Paradine was keen to address the shortcomings of its resource planning. Reinagl wanted a solution that could enable Paradine to streamline planning of teams and resources with Jira so that everything was hosted on one platform. It was also key that the solution could maximize resource utilization across multiple projects and allow project managers to quickly find available team members to take on work.
Thankfully, Reinagl found it all – and more – in Tempo Planner
The use of Tempo Planner improved communication between team members and project managers. If any of them were overbooked or had more time on their hands, they would inform project managers so that changes could be made promptly.
In fact, through the capacity reporting function of Tempo Planner, Paradine could avoid the practice of overbooking, as project managers now have a complete view of team members’ availability. There’s greater transparency as well, so team culture can be nurtured from that point onwards. The report also provides Paradine with crucial information on how resources are allocated for the long run, which is crucial in helping it attain company goals.
Making the Most Out of Tempo Apps One of the greatest things about Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Planner is the Planned vs. Actual report function.
It pulls data from both resource planning and time logs to offer greater visibility into how much work was accomplished compared to what was planned. Project managers can easily estimate the time required for projects and determine the average margin of error for estimation.
According to Reinagl, both apps come with a range of features, but they’re not hard to use so leveraging them was enjoyable.
Travelling Further into the Galaxy Paradine found themselves running their operations more efficiently after leveraging Tempo’s apps – it has been years now and the company is still maintaining its dynamics. As a business, once you’re able to optimize planning and improve workload management, you will end up making better decisions and grow your capacity to take up more projects. Sometimes, all it takes is the right solution.
“If you use Jira to manage your everyday work, to manage your tasks, and to manage your implementations, then Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Planner bring a real benefit, because you track time and plan right where you’re working. You don’t have to change anything, you don’t have to go anywhere else, you just log or plan your time with the push of a button and that’s it.” Denise Reinagl, IT Project Manager and Jira Admin at Paradine.