Capacity Planner - Jira Team & Resource Management | Tempo

3/17/17: I've spent several days working with Tempo Planner, looking to develop it as a replacement for the MS Project and Excel tools I currently use to manage a team of 35 across 30+ projects. Here is what I have found so far: 1. It's not intuitive, and the help materials are limited. Walking through the videos helps, but it's just a start, and there are some areas that I can't find any good documentation on (like the concepts behind time periods and percent efforts for resources, and how they relate to capacity planning). But then MS Project is anything but intuitive, so I'd like to think my expectations here are realistic. 2. Planner seems to be able to do about 50% of what I need, but what I really need is the ability to do the following: a. Look at resources over time from a project/sponsor perspective, ie who is on a project at what effort for the next 12 months. b. Look at resources over time from a resource manager perspective, ie organized by staff member. Ideally I’d be able to associate a manager with each resource and filter by that to get the resource manager view. c. Look at projects over time from a staff perspective, ie what am I as a team member assigned to at what levels for the next 12 months? d. I also need to be able to characterize the team utilization, ie compare capacity to utilization to say what percentage of the team is assigned to a project. I currently do this in Excel. UPDATE 4/4/17: Tempo has gotten in touch with me and I've had a good conversation regarding the current offering and the future roadmap. I've learned about an alternative approach that may help me in the short run to accomplish the second need above, and in the long run, Tempo is working towards a solution that meets most the needs I describe above (not sure about c, but it's the lowest priority for me). They also mentioned that they are working to bring the cloud and server versions onto the same code base, which will have many obvious benefits for customers and Tempo.

The app doesn't fit our needs. We need a simple way to plan amount of hours per month per person. The tempo planner is converting the plans to daily plans (cannot stay at month level). Also, the timeline view always shows day resolution, even if I choose months. And most importantly, I can not see in the timeline view the available capacity per person in the same planning tab (I need to switch to capacity view back and forth). In the resources view I can see overload/underload, but the view is always daily, even when switching to weekly, and there is no monthly view. Also the plan is always converted to daily plan.

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  Tempo Software

  Hi Ran,

  Thank you for your feedback.

  We are trying to cover as many use cases as possible, however, for any feature you want to be added, please feel free to visit our Idea Portal here, and submit these ideas. When other customers vote on your idea, it will help to increase its visibility, as well as the likelihood to get it implemented. When you submit an idea or vote for it, as soon as there is any update, you will get notified automatically.

  You can be sure that our product team is analyzing feature requests from our customers diligently and we are adding new features to all our Tempo products constantly.

  You can see the latest updates here.

  If you need any further assistance, please feel free to contact us.

  Have a great day,

  Ibrahim Gurel

  Customer Success Manager

Tempo have been through a lot of changes in the past 18 months (so I've been advised by their Product Manager), as the business has moved from their old model to being a SaaS provider. This was forced on them by Jira, who were forcing all their partners (add-on providers) to switch to their new model. The reason I am mentioning this is because it has had a significant impact on the solutions they provide. This has meant the best part of 2017 to-date, that they have had major performance issues with the products. Which has resulted in pages either take a very long time to load (minutes), or just not loading at all. In fact I attended a product Webinar, where even their presenter had issues with both slow and/or not loading pages throughout their presentation. They have been working hard over the last month or so, and are reassuring their consumers this will continue to improve as they work closely with Jira to optimize the performance. However this still should be considered when deciding if this product is ready enough for your business/needs. When all said and done this is a great product, which has only been let down by its recent performance issues. I am hopeful they will get over these issues and continue to develop what is a great product. It's only other down fall is the lack of up to date documentation, although if you are computer literate like myself, you can fudge through most of it without any major problems. Whilst they do have a great helpful support team always willing to help. They have also just started up Webinars to help explain recent changes, that they have/or about to make which are different to their documentation. This is a great move and should help new admins understand the system better, allowing for quick fire questions to be raised throughout it. This is truly a great product, which at least suits a software house such are ours 100% along with Timesheets. We are able to both Plan in our our development work with various teams, and also record the amount of time/effort it has taken against the plan. This helps us as a business record and recover costs that have been used to deliver our software solutions. While also allowing us to learn from past jobs and improve our work estimates on similar future work. The performance issues are still the biggest risk with this product, which is why I would warn any business to use a sense of caution in considering this product. However that said is defiantly one I would bookmark, and keep your ears open to news of these issues being a thing of the past.

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  Tempo Software

  Hi James,

  Thanks you for your comprehensive review of our product Tempo Planner.

  As you rightly state, we have had some lag issues recently which we have been working hard to address. The changes that have been made to our systems, will only benefit our customers in the long run and these are changes that had to be made from a business point of view.

  We are working very hard to improve our documentation and we note that this is a work in progress.

  Thank you for being a customer and we very much look forward to servicing your organisation for many years to come.

  Kind regards,

  Albert Hauksson

  Planner Product Owner

  Tempo

Disappointed that planning has been removed for sprinting. now hard to manage the resources and plan. I cant use the tool for looking at the sprint an more, no use for me. Removing the add-on.

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  Tempo Software

  Hi Vishnu,

  Thank you for your feedback. Please know that we greatly regret your dissatisfaction!

  Feedback from our customers has had a significant impact on how Tempo's product has developed. In response to in-depth product research and input from our customers, our product team decided to put a greater focus on Resource Planning and to phase out some of the existing features. The goal is to improve usability and user experience by increasing efficiency, ensuring transparency and maximizing resource utilization.

  Once again, thank you for your feedback and please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any questions!

  Kind regards,

  Soumaya Mroueh

  Customer Success Manager

I was looking for something similar to a drop plan extension available for VSTS and found tempo. It is similar indeed, but it is not tied to the sprints, or work planned for the sprint. You would have to put issues one by one manually into the timeline, as well as you can add the same issue multiple times. Very unclear UX, that's why we won't proceed with Tempo Planner implementation.