In the past year, working from home went from being a perk to becoming a necessity due to the pandemic. As a result, companies hastily started adopting remote work as their new temporary way of operating. However, many of the processes that work within an office environment suddenly disappeared, often creating gaps in productivity, optimization, and profitability.
Or did they?
One of the obstacles companies could be facing today might not necessarily be a loss in efficiency, but instead be the loss of visibility of data and processes caused by the distancing of a company’s workforce.
Tools like Atlassian’s Jira lay a good foundation to resolve this gap, but pairing Jira with add-ons on the Atlassian Marketplace, such as the Tempo Suite, could help harness insights from a plethora of additional use cases. Today, we’ll explore how the Tempo Suite empowers Jira and remote teams by providing insights on where time is being spent, how it may help companies better optimize available resources, and track the costs of projects.
Understanding where effort is spent
Remote work inevitably changes the way we interact and communicate with each other, and how we work. As a result, it might be difficult to quickly understand what the team is up to, how projects are progressing, and most importantly, what needs to be prioritized.
One way to improve the shared understanding of the company’s expended effort would be by harnessing processes that promote access to data and improve transparency. This is where Tempo Timesheets comes into play.
This time tracking tool allows you to log time directly in Jira so you’ll be able to access, with the right permissions, data that can be use for a multitude of use cases, some of which are:
- Understand where time is spent
- Track time for billable time and invoicing
- Measure CAPEX & OPEX
Most importantly, the data allows you to drive business decisions, meaning that you’ll have more ways to ensure the long-term health of the business.
Now equipped with a way to gather accurate data, you’ll be able to quickly understand, through Tempo reports, how much time was spent for a certain period of time by different teams/projects/users.
Make the most out of your resources
While everyone is working remotely, it might also be harder to manage the available resources and determine whether the team is working at full capacity, whether additional resources are needed, or if a project can be delivered on time.
Once again, working from home might impact the visibility in the data and processes and allow for potential unwanted data silos. One way to avoid this situation would be to use a resource planning tool, such as Tempo Planner, to provide transparency and optimize the allocation of resources directly in Jira (in this case, resources refers to employees).
Tempo Planner allows you to create plans for yourself and others, as well as see what others are scheduled to work on in the future. In other words, you can allocate time to tasks and projects to the team, see who is underworked/overworked and quickly see whether the team has enough resources available to complete the project on time.
One of the big questions of the pandemic is whether working from home impacts productivity and efficiency. With Tempo Planner, it would be possible to mitigate some of the effects through the optimization of available resources.
Tracking Costs and maximizing profitability
Finally, another element that companies should have a solid grasp on, especially in times of remote work, pertains to the data and insights surrounding costs. It’s important to have the ability to determine that effort is not going to waste and see the health of projects.
Through the other Tempo apps, we were to identify where effort is being placed and ensuring that projects get delivered on time. That being said, Cost Tracker for Tempo Timesheets, provides the transparency required to quickly aggregate relevant data from Jira and convert that into insights that will drive business decisions.
Since this app leverages the data from Jira and Tempo Timesheets, all you’ll need to do is to determine the scope of the project that you’re trying to monitor, add the budget that should be used as a reference point, and provide the app with a cost/role. The tool will take care of the rest by automatically doing the calculations.
As a result you’ll no longer be deprived of crucial monetary insights that dictate whether a project is worth the effort.
Conclusion
As more companies announce going fully remote for the long term (like Atlassian and Twitter) or remote for the time being (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Salesforce), others are declaring that they are becoming remote-first companies (Upwork, Coinbase).
Some companies offer options to work from home or in the office (Atlassian) while others will have no official office space and will only operate remotely.
The question remains whether companies have the tools needed to mitigate gaps caused by WFH. We’ve explored some options with Jira and the Tempo Suite to improve the transparency of a company and remove some potential data silos to promote productivity, efficiency, and profitability.
For more information on Tempo, visit the website or book a demo with Communardo, one of Tempo’s official partners.