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Tempo Brings Project Management Practices to Jira
Traditional project management practices do not disappear as an organization transitions to Agile and product-centric delivery. These capabilities are often distributed to other delivery roles, such as resourcing for team leads and financing for product owners, if organizations decide to gradually dissolve the project manager role. See our Build a Better Product Owner blueprint for more information on how product owners are assuming project management responsibilities. Teams leverage application lifecycle management tools to manage and govern their delivery work, but they do not offer the resource planning, time tracking, financial management, and other project management capabilities that are needed for successful delivery.
Atlassian’s Jira remains a popular collaboration tool for teams looking to better coordinate work. However, it requires third-party add-ons and integrations to support end-to-end artifact traceability and product delivery. Tempo fills Jira’s project management capability gap by enabling managers to:
- Track the status of delivery work against timesheets and deadlines
- Visualize the utilization and allocation of teams and resources
- Plan and monitor the financials of projects and portfolios, including CapEx and OpEx
This plug-in enables real-time updates of key dashboards whenever work progresses through the delivery pipeline in Jira and can motivate bringing project management and delivery tools closer together because of a common toolset. Teams can easily integrate Tempo into their workflow given that Tempo leverages the Jira UI. Tempo does not provide the more advanced or comprehensive project management capabilities (e.g. forecasting) that traditional project management tools provide.
Unfortunately, this tool can reinforce project management practices, which risks the delay or resistance to fully transition to a product-centric model. Sufficient training and onboarding are needed to ensure project management capabilities complement product-centric practices.
Our Take
Tempo enhances the value of an organization’s Jira investment by generating the project dashboards and reports stakeholders and management ask in real time. This plug-in does not provide the comprehensive capabilities as other project management tools but it can be just enough to satisfy stakeholder and management concerns. Much like any other integration, this plug-in should motivate the evaluation of the application lifecycle management architecture, particularly the integration of your tools and the relationship among all of your artifacts, in order to make the most value of your tools.