Working with Tempo Teams

Working with Tempo teams makes it easier to collectively manage the work done by a group of people -- and teams need Team Leads. Being a Tempo Team Lead gives you permission to view team members' worklogs, plan time for team members (if you have Capacity Planner installed), and approve team members' timesheets.

Creating Teams

The first step to working with teams is to create one, and to do this, you need the Tempo Team Administrator permission from your Jira administrator.

If you need to manage the plans and work done by your team, but not create or delete teams, you only need to be a member of a Permission Role for that team and be assigned the Manage Team permission.

Assigning the Team Lead Role

The most typical way to become a Team Lead is to assign yourself as the Team Lead when you create one or more teams. However, anyone else with the Tempo Team Administrator permission can also assign you as a Team Lead for one or more teams.

Being a Tempo Team Lead doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your position in your organization. If you're a manager, it's common to create a team that includes employees who report to you. However, you can create teams in Tempo with anybody in them. For example, you might be a Team Lead for project that is being worked on by people from different departments in your company, or you could be the Team Lead for a scrum team whose members have different roles.

There can only be one Team Lead per team, but you can add someone to a Permission Role and then grant them all of the permissions needed to access the team.

Adding Members to Your Team

When you add members to a team, you can assign their Roles, Skills, and Time Commitment for each team in which they're members (which matters for planning) and the dates on which they join or leave the team. One person can be on more than one team.

You can also add members "in bulk" using a Jira group, which is a quick way to add many members at once. After they're added, you can edit their information, such as their team role, skills, commitment, or joining and leaving dates.

Managing Permissions for Your Teams

Once you’ve added members to your team, you need to configure permissions for them. Click Teams :teams_dc: in the sidebar to open the Teams view, then select your team to go to your team's overview. Select Permissions in the top right.

Tempo Team permissions define how teams view and work with worklogs, timesheets, and plans. These permissions are applied to Permission Roles within each team. By default, a new team has two Permission Roles: Team Lead and Member.

As a Team Lead, you have permissions to view, manage, and approve all plans and worklogs, and also to manage the team.
By default, Members don't have any team permissions - for example, they can’t view the worklogs of their teammates. You probably don't want all team members to be able to view each other's worklogs or plan time for each other, but giving them permissions to View Plans lets them see the work that is planned for or by their teammates.

A Permission Role is a powerful and flexible tool for giving specific permissions to certain team members or other non-members. For example, you can give more or all permissions to a senior team member so that they're like a Team Lead. You can also add a Jira user group to a Permission Group, such as giving a group of other Team Leads permissions to view plans. Permission roles can be managed within each individual team's Permissions page – or in cases where you want to create permission roles for multiple teams or users, within the Permission Roles page in Settings.

Team Leads are usually part of a team, too. When as a Team Lead you submit your own timesheet, you can select a Reviewer to approve your timesheet. If there are no available reviewers, you will need to be added to a team or ensure that an appropriate reviewer is granted the Approve Timesheets permission for a team you lead. It's important to note that you cannot approve your own timesheet.

Linking Your Team to Jira Projects

From your Team Overview (click your team's name in the Teams view), you can link your team to Jira projects on which they're working. This makes your team available in Jira searches and filters.

Linking your team to projects also lets you plan time for your team members in Capacity Planner.

Before you can plan with issues from these projects, you need to link your team to these issues:

Make sure that the Tempo Team Custom Field is visible in your Jira screens.
Link the Jira project to your team, as described above.
In Jira, open an issue to which you want to link your team, and then click Edit. Scroll down to the Team field, and select your team from the drop-down. Click Update at the bottom of the issue to save these changes.
Now your team can be used in the Jira Issue search, such as when creating filters for Jira Agile boards.

Planning Time for Team Members

Teams make it easier to plan time for a project using Capacity Planner because you can consider each team member's availability and capacity for work. The Resource Planning view shows you at a glance how much work is assigned to each team member. For example, if a team member has room for more work, you can increase the number of hours assigned to them.

If you've linked your team projects to the Jira Epics in Jira with the start and end dates of your projects, then you can visualize the team plans based on the Jira Epics in the Team Planning View - just click to switch from Resource Planning to Team Planning and select the Tempo Teams that you want to plan for. The team plans are automatically visualized on the board. Team members are shown where they are shared among teams.

Viewing Your Team's Timesheets

As Team Lead, you can view your whole team's timesheet from the Timesheet view in Teams. This is a handy way to see all team members' work at a glance, and you can filter the data by User, Project, Issue, etc.

Approving Timesheets for Team Members

After team members have logged time, they must submit their timesheet for approval at the end of the current period. If they select you as the Reviewer, you'll get a notification of the submission. You can then approve or reject their timesheets from the Approval view in Teams.

As Team Lead, you can also submit timesheets for your team members. You may want to do this if they can't submit it themselves before the end of the approval period, such as if they're sick or on vacation.

If a team member needs more time to finish up their timesheet after an approval period is closed, you can grant them a grace period to edit their timesheet.

Reporting on Teams

Using Tempo Reports, you can get an overview of what is planned for a team, what work has been completed, and the team’s capacity for work. For example, you can see the number of hours logged for the issues for each team member, or the number of hours planned for an upcoming project.

To create a report that shows how a team's time has been spent, click Logged Time in the Reports overview and select TEAMS in the Filter by field, then select the teams you want to see, as well as other criteria.

If you have Tempo Capacity Planner installed, you can also run a Planned Time report to view the time that has been planned on projects for your team. Run a Team Member Capacity report to view the capacity calculations on the UI, based on your teams' planned hours and available hours.

A powerful thing about reports is that you can save them. This lets you create your own templates using all the filters and data that you set up. Then the next time you want to run that report, it's just one click in the Saved Reports section in the Reports overview.

You can watch a series of videos learn about managing your teams in Tempo. The full playlist can be found here.