Create Plans
You can create plans in multiple ways. These steps assume that you’re creating a project plan for your team members. We are creating plans on a week-by-week basis for longer-term planning, though you can create more granular plans. If you reuse plans, you can repeat them instead of recreating them.
If you do your planning in Jira, you can import your project plans into Tempo so you can take advantage of our reporting, monitoring, and forecasting tools.
Filter your planning views to specific users, teams, roles, generic resources, or skills to make plans easier to read while working on them.
Before you begin
These steps assume the following:
You have a team manager role
You have been assigned to a team
Your assigned team has team members
Your assigned team has generic resources for soft booking
Plan your time
You can plan time in multiple ways, but the instructions show how to quickly plan time for your team members for a period of time using the Resource view.
You can assign planned time to a Jira issue, such as an epic, or to a project.
In the Resource view, click and drag through multiple days. The Plan Time form opens.
The dates you selected are filled in the Plan Time form.
If you want to plan time for a generic resource, click User, and then select Generic Resource. You can then select the generic resource in the next field.
Link the planned time to a Jira issue or project.
When planning time across multiple days, Period is selected automatically, and the start and end dates are filled in. When creating period plans, all plan hours are evenly distributed, regardless of availability.
You can Include non-working days in your plan, such as weekends or holidays. This option appears when you specify a date range that includes non-working days.
If your plan spans more than one year, we recommend that you divide it into two plans. Tempo Capacity Planner supports a maximum of one year span per plan.
Add how much time is expected to be spent per day on the project or issue.
Total hours to have them spread evenly over the number of days in the period plan.
Per day to plan this number of hours per day over the period.
Optional, you can choose to repeat the planned time.
Enter a reviewer. The reviewer must approve planned time if this is enabled. The Reviewer is usually a team lead, but it can be anybody on the list who has the Approve Plans permission for the team. If you’re a team lead, you can approve your own plans.
Tempo sends an email notification to the reviewer. The Status of your plan will be Pending until it is either Approved or Rejected.Click Plan Time to create your plan.
When a plan is approved or rejected, the person submitting the plan for approval is notified, and the plan’s status changes in the Resource Planning view or Team Planning timeline.
When planning time on an issue by issue basis or per day, if a day is fully booked or an issue has no or remaining estimate, the Planned Time field is blank, so you must enter the number of hours you want to plan.
Create plans from Jira
You can import plan data from Jira issues and create plans from them in the Resource Planning view. This lets you create plans quickly and keeps the plans up-to-date when there are changes to the Jira issues, assuming you don't break the link between Jira and Capacity Planner.
The following fields are required and cannot be modified in Jira or Capacity Planner to keep the link between the two.
Assignee
Due Date
Original Estimate
When importing Jira issues, the Due Date needs to be today or later, and the Jira issue's Status must not be Closed or Resolved.
When you import the Jira issues, plans are created for each Assignee over the time periods that are determined by the issue's Due date and Original Estimate fields. The Due Date is the end date for the plan, then working backwards from that, the hours in the Original Estimate are divided over the working days as determined by the resource's Workload scheme.
For example, if a user has 8 hours available for work per day and is importing a plan that requires 24 hours, the plan will be distributed over 3 days with 8 hours each dedicated to that imported plan. If the user has 2 days left until the due date, then it will distribute 12 hours per day.
Best practices for creating plans
Creating plans is most effective for short-term or sprint planning when you have assigned Jira issues to resources and have a good idea of the due dates and amount of work required.
It's good practice to start with a clean slate: import Jira issues first to create plans, then add or adjust other plans around them as you need. This is because plans already created for a resource are not considered when importing Jira issues to create plans. For example, let's say that Amy has 10 out of her required 40 hours already planned for the week. Then Jira issues are imported, and plans are created for her based on her workload scheme (40 hrs per week), so she now has 50 hours planned for that week.
To edit a plan that's been created from a Jira issue, it's best to edit the Jira issue and then update the plan. This keeps the connection active between the plan and its Jira issue. Changes made to Jira issues in Capacity Planner will not be reflected in Jira. See Editing Plans and Updating Plans below.
To create a plan from Jira:
Select a filter in the Filter by field to display only the team members whose time you’re. planning. The Assignee in the Jira issues must match the resources who are displayed in the Resource Planning view to be able to import their Jira issues.
Click the Import button at the top-right. All Jira issues that are eligible to be imported are listed in the Import from Jira dialog according to the filter that you have selected. You can add a filter in this dialog, which doesn't affect the filters in the Resource Planning view.
Select the issues you want to import. You can also select the box beside Jira Issue at the top of the list to select all issues, and then click Import.
Plans are created for each Assignee over the time periods that are determined by the Jira issue's Due date and Original Estimate data. The Due Date is the end date for the plan, then working backwards from that, the hours in the Original Estimate are divided over the working days as determined by the resource's Workload scheme. These plans are indicated by an Import icon and Tempo Capacity Planner keeps a connection between the plan and its corresponding Jira issue. The Import icon also appears next to the resource's name and will disappear once the page is refreshed.
By default, issues of imported plans will not appear in the Issues list. To include them in the Issues list, go to the Issue side panel, click on Settings and check the Include Jira imported plans box.
Editing plans
When you make modifications to a plan that’s already been approved, the plan is resubmitted to the reviewer for approval and the plan status returns to Pending.
You can’t edit plans that were created for you by your team lead or another user with Manage Plans permission.
Click the plan you want to edit.
Make your changes in the Edit Plan form.
Click Update to confirm the changes.
Edit plans imported from Jira
A plan that's been created from a Jira issue retains a connection to it unless you modify the following fields:
Assignee
Due Date
Original Estimate
If you move the plan to another team member, move the plan on the timeline, or change the number of hours assigned for each day, a dialog prompts you to confirm the change.
If you Edit the plan anyway, the connection between the plan and its Jira issue is lost. You won't be prompted for an update if any changes are made to the 3 relevant fields in the Jira issue. You can then edit the plan as you like. If you import the same Jira issue again, a new plan is created from it, and your edited plan remains unchanged.
You can add or change the Description in a plan without affecting the connection to its Jira issue.
Updating Plans
When you make changes to any of the relevant fields in the Jira issue (Assignee, Due Date, or Original Estimate) after you have imported it, you can update the related plans so that they use this new Jira data instead of manually updating the plans in the Resource view as your project changes.
Click the Import button at the top-right.
In the Import from Jira dialog, click the Updates tab. A notification appears on this tab with the number of updates to indicate that at least one of the 3 relevant fields in an imported Jira issue (Assignee, Due Date, or Original Estimate) has changed since the issue was last imported. All the Jira issues that have changed are listed here.
Check the box for each issue you want to update, or check the box beside Jira Issue at the top of the list to select all issues.
Click the Update button to confirm that you want to update the plans from the selected Jira issues. Any current plans based on these Jira issues are updated with the change.
When the Import from Jira dialog is closed, you'll see a number on the Import button to indicate when changes may have been made directly in the Jira issues. You can choose to update the corresponding plans with this new data.
Viewing the Plan Status
Plans in the Resource Planning view (both Days and Weeks views) are labeled according to type and status, so reviewers can quickly spot plans that are pending approval. When you hover over the colored dot on a plan, you see the plan's status and reviewer.
Rejected - the plan has been rejected, and an email is sent tot he team member who submitted the plan.
Pending - the plan has been submitted for approval.
Approved - the plan has been approved.