This is a story about DEISER, a Spanish Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner Enterprise, and our story with Tempo starts in 2011 (back then, Tempo was under TM Software!), which is also the year DEISER decided to focus exclusively on Atlassian solutions. We decided to implement Tempo Timesheets to report billable hours — a must when you’re doing consulting-related work. To this day, we still use it daily!
A need to scale: Planning Availability vs. Planning Capacity
It wasn’t until 2018 that the team decided to take another leap of faith. This time to go beyond looking at resource availability, and into resource management.
Looking back, a change was necessary to enable our business to grow. Here’s why the change was necessary from an operational standpoint:
At DEISER, consultants are entirely autonomous. This means everyone decides on the projects to tackle and their scheduling. Since the team is self-organized, it’s vital to have a constant view of everyone’s availability for two main reasons:
- After analyzing a proposal, a consultant may reach the conclusion that someone else is the best-suited expert. But is that colleague available to take on a new customer?
- An analysis may reach some gray areas surrounding the assessment and the valid alternatives. During those situations, it’s important to know who’s available to consult in the office, who’s on duty but can spare an hour, and who’s neck-deep in work and shouldn’t be disturbed.
Back then, this was managed using “Team Calendars” in Confluence. Every consultant would log their meetings and the time they’d be away from the office.
The strategy was simple and helpful, but some flaws eventually surfaced:
- When the team grew from the 4 initial members to >30, the calendar was unable to scale as a tool. The availability of any given team member overtime was hard to track, and the overview became overcrowded and offered with poor visibility.
- No reporting or KPIs could be built on top of the calendar
- There was no integration with Jira
- Team members that were pulled into a meeting with a customer had no clear idea of where to log their hours
Team Calendars offer a timeline where each member is represented with a color bar. But in this view, the line is cut off and makes it unreadable.
The main pain points that became evident were the inability to plan the capacity of each team member, to determine how many cases a consultant was going to close in the following weeks, and to determine the workload that they could still tackle.
Operationally, we were going full speed. But from a perspective of growth and business strategy, we were being reactive.
Solving this problem was necessary to the well-being of the business, and so after having evaluated alternatives to replace Team Calendars, Tempo Planner was fully implemented in February 2018.
Click the button below to learn how we have implemented Tempo Planner and Tempo Timesheets.
