The prod dev guide to Timesheets and Capacity Planner

What are Timesheets and Capacity Planner – and how do they help product development teams deliver on their projects on time and on budget?

Tempo Team

Developing a new product is far from simple – otherwise, I suppose we’d all be doing it. The reality is that it can be overwhelming to develop products without a powerful project management tool to keep track of all your projects and processes. It takes tech to make tech – that’s why it’s essential for an organization to have the right infrastructure in place to support the development of new products.

What are the challenges facing new product development?

The ultimate goal of any product development team is to keep team members motivated, meet development deadlines and budgets, and effectively track how resources and efforts are distributed within the organization.

That’s an enormous project in and of itself. If your teams are all working on different or outdated tools, it can start to compound at each stage of the development cycle and make everything take longer and cost a lot more than it should.

If everyone is on different tools, then communicating work and progress becomes time-consuming and will always end up taking a back seat compared to what people feel is their “actual” job. If things are outdated and slow, or you can’t properly track capacity, you risk burning out your employees and shattering team morale.

The aim of any tool you work with should be to make it possible to build the highest quality product for customers and make it as easy as possible for your teams. Not just the actual workflows, but managing those issues, checking what they are working on, and being able to show what they are delivering.

Another challenge is that, for many companies, we aren’t all sitting in the same office to walk over and chat to everyone about the status of each project. Sometimes we are remote, sometimes across time zones, and it isn’t as simple as a quick chat to know what needs doing.

Effective communication between these teams is crucial because inefficiencies can cost an organization time and money. It can eliminate duplicate work, improve team morale, and save a lot of energy for your team members who no longer need to spend hours tracking down where every bit of information from people is hiding.

Even an incremental improvement in team communication could be the difference maker for a project and help you overtake the competition – both in being a more productive team and a more attractive place to work.

With that ultimate goal in mind of keeping your devs happy and your projects on-time and on-budget – let’s talk about exactly how Tempo helps with its award-winning add-ons for Jira.

Timesheets and Capacity Planner

Tempo is trusted by a third of the Fortune 500 for portfolio management. Timesheets and Capacity Planner are the #1 Jira add-ons for time tracking and capacity management.

With Capacity Planner you can:

Plan for your people, teams, projects, and programs
Manage your backlog for better performance and delegation
Perform high-level and granular capacity planning for product releases and program roadmaps
Connect your distributed teams
Visualize plan health status in real-time

With Timesheets you can:

Track time on work performed seamlessly within Jira
Plan and report flexibly for teams, projects, accounts, and more
Get relevant, real-time business data
Track internal issues such as vacations, meetings and sick days
Account for holidays, flexible employee work hours, and distributed teams

Paired together, Capacity Planner and Timesheets help you plan for the road ahead and track the road traveled. That means you know who is being overworked, what projects are understaffed, and understand where all your project hours are going without the hassle of doing it all manually.

If you’re tracking time for your teams in Jira while operating without an agile resource and capacity planning tool, then you may have difficulty planning effectively for upcoming epics, projects, and iterations.

Capacity Planner with Timesheets provide a view of the big picture. The work planned for in Capacity Planner and Jira can easily be turned into tangible, quantifiable worklog data, which can be used to determine where change is needed.

Combined – management gets the data they need to understand where their attention is needed and how time is being spent. Workers get their invoices and hours handled with minimal hassle so they can get back to what they do best – and have the ability to report on their Jira projects quickly and simply.

The pièce de résistance: The planned vs. actual report

One of the most powerful reports in Tempo is the planned vs. actual report, which requires both Timesheets and Capacity Planner. With it, team leads can limit unknowns and build more accurate plans for their resources. What the report does is allow you to look at how much time you planned compared to how much time you spent on a given initiative.

Related article: The planned vs. actual report in Jira with Tempo

By regularly running the planned vs. actual report over the lifetime of a project, managers can monitor and evaluate how their teams are doing. They can take action to stay on track, such as adding or removing resources.

This report helps managers to monitor the progress of their projects. Based on the numbers collected from the planned vs. actual report, they can adjust future forecasts and determine how long projects actually take. Learning to make better estimates opens the door to greater profitability.