In the past, I have spent countless hours using an array of different systems and tools to manage my team’s time. I would spend a good portion of every week doing tasks such as calculating capacity, tracking holidays, and the endless chore of making certain all time was entered into our project management system.
With our current setup we only use two systems for our time tracking and project management. Atlassian’s Jira Cloud is our project management tool whereas a plugin, called Tempo Timesheets, is the software we use for tracking our billable and non-billable time. The reason we don’t use Jira’s built-in time tracking is because the reporting and analytics in Tempo is far superior.
I no longer need to waste time transferring information from one system to another to effectively manage my team’s time. After the initial configuration, I barely spend more than an hour a week on what would usually take almost a full day to complete! 📈
At that time our project management system was useful for tracking time to tasks within a project. I was able to run reports and had the ability to review the time each team member spent on a project for any specified time period. What I could not do was calculate utilization by comparing the users capacity for the week against the hours worked. Now with employing the use of Atlassian’s tools I can do it all in a fraction of the time. Jira is where to create users and track progress on projects. Templo is the star ✨ when it comes to managing your team’s time.
The features in Tempo allow you to setup the number of hours you expect your team to work in advance. Using schemes, you can specify how many hours are expected to be entered in the system for that day of the week. Schemes also allow you to track holidays that need to be included when calculating your team’s utilization. You also have the ability to configure and manage periods and control when time is entered for specified periods. You can choose which day the week will begin on and the date of the month each monthly period will begin. On top of that you schedule time periods and control when your team can enter time, how much time they can enter per day, and remind them to enter time.
The last major component of setup is creating your individual teams and who will be reviewing and approving their timesheets. Once this is done, it takes moments for the assigned approver to review who has or has not submitted a timesheet for a period as well as review a team member’s utilization for any specified time period. From this same area the manager can also review a team member’s individual time entries, approve/reject a timesheet, and grant a grace period, or additional time to submit worklogs before the period closes.
Although there is a bit of setup involved with Jira and Tempo, I believe the ROI is well worth it. I know I hated wasting time moving information around and plugging in numbers. I’m positive you would agree that is not a good use of time when there is one platform that can do it all for you.
If you have any feedback (I’m always looking to make improvements) or questions related to this post please don’t hesitate to contact me at danielle@anant.us!
Interested in learning more about some ways you can level up your project management skills? Check out this blog post by my college Arturs, on the Top 10 Links for the Indispensable Project Manager.
