How do I plan sprints using Tempo Planner?

We recently adjusted the scope of Tempo Planner to better focus on resource planning -- and deprecated our iteration planning features as a result. For those of you using Planner to plan sprints, this has presented a challenge. Without the backlog view, many of you have reverted to maintaining your sprints and backlogs in Jira. However, we have heard that many of you still need a way to plan by resources.

Our team did some testing and came up with the following steps you can use to plan sprints using the most recent version of Tempo Planner:

Please note that you must have permission to plan time for others, plan time for teams and view team plans in order to complete the following steps. Read more about Team Plans and Manage Team plans here.

1. Create a Scrum team in Tempo
• Create a Tempo team and ensure the members belong to the correct workload schemes so you will have accurate capacity calculations
• Link the team to the Jira project.
  
  
2. Use Jira to create and prioritize your backlog of issues
   • Link Jira issues to Tempo Teams by using the Tempo Team custom field. The team backlog can then be filtered by the team custom field.
     
     
3. In Jira, add estimates (in hours) to the Original Estimate field for each backlog item
   • Jira time tracking fields need to be enabled; click here for the steps.
     
     
4. Return to Tempo Planner to confirm team capacity
   • Go to Resource Planning to see a list of team members and their availability for the duration of the Sprint.
   • Filter the view to reflect the Sprint scheduled start and end date for your Scrum team.
     
     
5. Create the Sprint in Jira and drag issues into it
   • Try to match the team capacity in terms of hours - don’t overload the team.
6. Use Resource Planning to see your Scrum team’s capacity for the duration of the Sprint
   • The Resource Planning view will show the total available hours of this team for the duration of the sprint, taking into account the work requirements of each team member, planned time off and/or other off sprint duties that have been planned.
7. During daily standup meetings, use the Resource Planning view to assign Sprint issues and adjust plans.
   • Use JQL to create and save the Sprint filter in Jira
   • Access the Resource Planning Days view in Tempo and configure the Issues side panel to include the new Jira filter.
   • Don’t forget that you can use the period selector to select the period you want to plan for.
     
     
8. Team members can then use My Work to see what they are assigned to work on each day and can log work directly on the issues planned for them.
   • This provides accurate time tracking and allows for better estimates of planned versus actual hours logged on each backlog item for future Sprints.

These steps are intended for those of you who go a step beyond the basic Agile method of Sprint planning and assign tasks to specific resources.