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15. January 2020 Samuel Titka

Tempo Planner – human resources planning in Jira

How do we determine, for example, if we have enough developers for our new project using Tempo Planner? The solution is the team capacity view, which Tempo Planner offers.

It might seem that capacity planning and resource planning are the same thing.

 

However, the opposite is true—they are different processes with different outputs. Despite different processes, capacity and resource planning are closely related and cannot exist independently. Perhaps that’s why these terms are often confused.

Today’s blog post will show you how to use the Tempo Planner extension to cover these processes in the Jira Server.

Capacity planning

The task of capacity planning is to answer questions like “Do we have enough human resources with the necessary skills to cover the selected project(s)?”

Capacity planning does not involve individual resources; it focuses on skill levels or teams. Ultimately, this process also helps decide whether to hire new employees, what skills they should have, and whether some projects must be postponed or cancelled.

Since capacity planning focuses on teams and employees’ skills, it is correct to assume these entities should exist in the Jira tool. Therefore, Tempo Planner allows the creation of employee teams. Teams can correspond to the organisational structure, be product—or project-oriented, or correspond to employees’ skills (roles). When adding an employee to a team, they can be assigned to a specific role (such as Developer, Tester, Solution Architect, Business Analyst, Project Manager, Scrum Master, etc.).

Of course, assigning employees to various holiday schemes or work schedules (such as 40 hours, 37.5 hours per work week, etc.) is possible, and these associations are reflected in the plans. However, let’s return to the essence of capacity planning. So, how do we determine, using Tempo Planner, whether we have enough developers for our new project?

 

The solution lies in the view of team capacity that Tempo Planner offers:

 

 

For the selected team [A] and view [B] (day, week, month, or quarter), Tempo Planner displays the amount of planned work versus the working hours for each team member [C] and overall for the team [D]. Cells highlighted in orange enable quick identification of resource overallocation.

Alternatively, an alternative view shows the direct display of available developer capacity for the upcoming weeks:

 

Human Resource Planning

One of the tasks of human resource planning, often referred to as employee allocation, is answering the question, “Who, when, and on which project is working?”

Human resource planning often involves determining specific tasks an employee works on in certain projects. However, this is a misconception – this task belongs to project planning.

Human resource planning aims to identify and allocate specific employees with the necessary skills to achieve the goals of selected projects while ensuring they are not over-located (or underutilised).

The individual allocations then serve as inputs to various views, such as capacity planning, which we introduced in the previous chapter.

Tempo Planner provides a view for human resource planning as well, which looks like this:

 

 

For the selected team [A] and period/view [B], Tempo Planner displays the allocations for each team member [C] for individual days in the calendar view [D].

A green icon is displayed if the planned work for a particular day equals the working hours. Otherwise, an orange or red indicator indicates the employee’s availability or overallocation.

In this view, Tempo Planner also displays the available capacity for the shown weeks [E] based on the displayed employees. Lastly, each employee’s available capacity [F] is calculated in the selected period [B]. For additional details, hover the cursor over this value to reveal the overall availability, the amount of planned work, or even the sum of overallocation from individual days.

Instead of selecting the team [A], employees can be filtered by their roles or names.

To fully answer the question “Who, when, and on which project is working?” it’s enough to “expand” the respective row [A] for a specific employee. The timeline will display individual allocations at the project level (or even project tasks if more detailed allocations within the project are necessary):

 

How do you allocate employees using Tempo Planner?

Employees can be allocated in several ways (via drag-and-drop or through a dialogue window) and from different views (resource planning view, directly from an open Jira issue, or from the timeline view of a specific team).

The most commonly used method is probably through the dialogue window:

 

 

Employees can be allocated to various entities (Jira projects, Jira issues, or even project components or versions) for a single day or multiple days within a selected period.

Planned time can be entered as the number of hours for each day within the chosen period or as a total number of hours. In the latter case, the time will be evenly distributed across the days of the specified period. Additionally, recurring allocations can be set up weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.

Among the handy advanced features of Tempo Planner is the ability to split the allocated time on a selected day (hold the Ctrl key and click on the desired day).

Before splitting:

 

 

After splitting:

 

How next?

Are you interested in this topic? Want to plan more effectively in your organisation?

We’d be happy to hear from you.

We can then show you further options, such as setting up a personalised Jira dashboard to display relevant tasks for each employee on the current day,

 

 

or how to create detailed reports and data exports on allocations,

 

 

or how to link planning with vacation and absence tracking, as well as other processes that can be covered in the Jira tool – for example, project budget management, employee recruitment and departure, time tracking of work done (billing data), and many other areas.

Samuel Titka
Atlassian Consultant

If you need assistance from experts with implementing or configuring Atlassian products or need advice on how to use them most effectively in your company, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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