How Timesheets and Capacity Planner support Paradine’s resource management process

Paradine is a global leader among consulting, services, and software companies in product master data management. The company is headquartered in Vienna, Austria with offices in Austria, Romania, and Ukraine. 

How does Paradine manage its workflow across three different countries?

“Jira is the glue that keeps us together,” explained Denise Reinagl, IT project manager and Jira admin at Paradine. “We have a lot of communication and meetings online and we need to have information in one system like Jira that everyone can access from anywhere, so we can work together.”

After hearing about Timesheets by Tempo for Jira and implementing it with great success in 2014, Paradine subsequently adopted Tempo Capacity Planner in 2018.

“If you use Jira to manage your everyday work, to manage your tasks, and to manage your implementations, then Timesheets and Tempo Capacity Planner bring a real benefit, because you track time and plan right where you’re working,” Reinagl said. “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.”

Get easy insights into your business with Timesheets by Tempo

Before implementing Tempo’s tools, Paradine used to log work in its ERP system, which has a main focus of tracking offers and purchases. The software included a plugin where users could enter that they spent a specific amount of time on a project position. The plugin did not include any reports, but it did give the possibility of tracking how much a project would cost and how much people had worked on it.

It was necessary to export to Excel and play around with the data until it was laid out in a pivot table in the way it needed to appear. Timesheets does all of that manual work through its reporting function, so the process is easier.“

Back then people needed to switch systems all the time. So when we started with Timesheets, it was accepted really fast because people loved that they opened their tasks in one system,” said Reinagl. 

For Paradine, the advantage to Timesheets is also that project managers actually have information on what people work on. For example, the data doesn’t show only ‘I worked on this project’, but ‘I worked on this project and I set up a server’. 

“Tempo Timesheets helped us to save time when logging our work, and the user interface is very customer-friendly,” explains Reinagl. “The time logs are now more detailed, which gives us additional cost information on our projects.”

Paradine also uses Timesheets, which is a way to track time across multiple teams and multiple projects. By connecting accounts to specific projects, worklogs can be assigned to accounts to provide data for reporting and bookkeeping. Paradine’s accounts include categories like specifications, project management, implementation, testing and customer meetings.

With its accounts and reports, Tempo Timesheets now gives Paradine significantly more insights and much more granular data than they had before. Reinagl emphasizes the value of the filters and sorting options on reports.

"We love them because they just give you so many options to work with the data you have. Just having the data would not really bring the benefit, but with the report options, and the filtering, and the sorting, I can really work with the data.”

Now, if somebody on the management team at Paradine asks how much time was spent on a particular customer in the past six months, Reinagl can get the report with up-to-date data within minutes and report the information. There’s no need to export it to Excel or make corrections and adjustments: the information is available straight away. 

In addition to reporting, Timesheets is very useful when tracking billable hours, which is an essential part of many business operations.

“If something goes wrong, we can’t bill the customer to fix it again,” Reinagl says. “So we have the rule that everyone books the billable and non-billable hours and the manager checks the hours before invoicing it to customers.” 

By 2018, after four years of benefiting from the insights of Timesheets, the team at Paradine was ready to try another element of Tempo’s toolkit: Tempo Capacity Planner.

Why Paradine implemented Tempo Capacity Planner

Tempo Capacity Planner is an app for Jira that streamlines the planning of teams and resources. Team leads can quickly find available team members and maximize resource utilization on multiple projects. Upon adoption, Capacity Planner quickly became a part of how Paradine organizes their work across different locations.

“I can’t commit to send software to a customer at a specific date and time if I don’t have any developers available in that time period,” explains Reinagl. “I need to reserve team members and make sure that somebody commits ‘Yes, you may have these people.’ Then if somebody needs my reserved resources, they have to ask me. Planning with Tempo gives me the possibility to document resource planning and plan changes.”  

Transparent and straightforward planning is now an important part of how Paradine attains its company goals. Planning hasn’t always been a simple part of its operations. Before implementing Tempo Capacity Planner, resource planning was done in Paradine’s ERP system with a pivot Excel based on the database to show how much resources were needed and to assign tasks to employees.

Team members were not able to see what they were planned for, and a project manager used to send his or her plan to employees in a screenshot so they knew what they should work on. 

“The system now is so much easier because employees can give me feedback like, ‘Hey, you overbooked me’ or ‘I actually have more time next week, give me a bit more’,” Reinagl says. “We have much more communication with each employee within the planning than there was before.” 

Another one of the key functionalities in Tempo Capacity Planner is the capacity report, which provides Paradine with crucial information on how resources are allocated for the long run. Tempo Capacity Planner helps team leads to minimize the practice of overbooking team members by making the availability of employees visible in one view. 

“I’m excited about Tempo Capacity Planner because I can create my teams in the sizes that I want,” Reinagl says. “It’s not like everyone sees everything, which is too much data, because I’m not interested in every employee of the whole company. I see subsystems- smaller teams- and that is really nice.” 

For Reinagl, the best part about Tempo Timesheets and Tempo Capacity Planner is the ease with which her team can use the products.

“With Tempo Capacity Planner, it took one meeting,” says Reinagl. “I read into it a bit, made a short presentation, and since then we are using it.”

“It’s running and it’s not complicated,” she continues. “It has nice features, but it’s not too hard to use.” “It’s just working,” she concludes.

Leveraging Timesheets and Capacity Planner together

One of the great benefits of having both Timesheets by Tempo and Tempo Capacity Planner is the planned vs. actual report, which pulls data from both resource planning and time records. With this practical report, Tempo presents greater visibility into how much work was accomplished compared to what was planned.

The report makes it easier to estimate the time required for projects and to determine the average margin of error for estimation.  Related article: Why we're so bad at estimating time – and how to solve it in Jira“I checked it out and I really like it, it gives us a lot of information that management has wanted to have for years,” Reinagl says. “It’s really hard to get if you don’t have an integrated system like Jira.”

Conclusion

Paradine saved themselves a lot of time and headache by using Tempo’s products over the years. With an interface that’s integrated with Jira, as well as insightful reporting, billable hours, and transparent resource planning, Tempo offers a wide range of benefits.

Companies can save time, get more clarity on their data, make better decisions, and focus on the projects that matter. Through better time tracking and resource planning, Paradine’s company operations are now more efficient and effective.