BigPicture Enterprise Cloud now integrates with Tempo

The users of Jira Server and Data Center have long benefited from the Tempo – BigPicture Enterprise integration. The new BigPicture Enterprise 8.2 makes the interface available to Cloud users, too. The synchronization covers workload schemes/plans, holiday schemes/plans, teams, team members, and roles/skills of Tempo Timesheets/Planner/Budgets and BigPicture Enterprise.

With the arrival of BigPicture 8.2 in October 2021, Jira on-premise users can migrate to the Cloud and retain the handy Tempo – BigPicture Enterprise integration.

Real-world applications

Let’s name three real-life uses of the Tempo – BigPicture Enterprise integration. Which exact BigPicture Enterprise views make the most of the resources originating from Tempo?

1. First and foremost, BigPicture’s Resources and Board modules can plan resources based on the capacity coming from Tempo. Let’s say that your Tempo has calculated a 35-hour capacity for John and 150-hour capacity for Team A, both for the first week of September. With the Tempo – BigPicture Enterprise integration, you can see the 35 hours and 150 hours in the Resources and Board modules.
2. Swimlanes. We all know how Tempo is great at forming teams. BigPicture does a great job displaying swimlanes for the Tempo teams. These swimlanes in BigPicture’s Roadmap and Board get created automatically, once teams from Tempo flowed into BigPicture. Furthermore, each of the Board’s swimlanes has Total capacity progress bars that can build on teams’ capacities coming from Tempo.
3. Skills panel recognizes individuals’ and teams’ capacities coming from Tempo, too. For instance, if John has a Software Architect Tempo role, and John has that capacity of 35 hours during that September week, the BigPicture Skills panel lets you control how over- or under-allocated the Software Architect role is within that timeframe.

Workflow: set up resources in Tempo, use them in BigPicture

You begin with setting up resources in Tempo, then you can use them in BigPicture.

Workload schemes, holiday schemes, teams, team members, roles, and resources of Tempo flow to BigPicture Enterprise once the BigPicture admin presses the ‘Synchronize with Tempo’ button. Now, you can use and modify the Tempo artifacts in BigPicture Enterprise for project management purposes. BigPicture’s Gantt, Scope (WBS), dependency Board, Roadmap, Risks, Calendar, and Reports modules all recognize work hours, holidays, teams, roles, resources that originate from Tempo. Note that on Cloud there is an extra step required – one-time authorization before you press the ‘Synchronize with Tempo’ button for the first time (see Jira main menu > BigPicture > App configuration).

Various scenarios are discussed in Tempo synchronization article in BigPicture documentation.

Why Tempo AND BigPicture?

Rather than choosing between, many Jira users install both Tempo Timesheets/Planner and BigPicture. The two products complement each other.

Tempo Timesheets and Planner are big on resource planning and balancing, time management, billing, and invoicing. By the way, Timesheets are far more popular than Planner.

BigPicture, in turn, is big on Project Portfolio Management, project management, work management, risk management – both predictive and agile.

Originally, BigPicture and Tempo were competitors of a kind. Have a look at BigPicture vs Tempo Planner fact sheet, that we authored back then. Later it became clear that both applications went their own ways and that BigPicture & Tempo enhance each other.

Conclusion

Jira Cloud users can now benefit from the Tempo – BigPicture Enterprise integration, that Server and Data Center users have long enjoyed. You can upgrade from Server to Cloud and retain the Tempo – BigPicture integration.

Many users have both Tempo Timesheets/Planner and BigPicture on their Jira instances because each product has its strengths – Tempo has its HR and accounting expertise, while BigPicture is PMO’s and project manager’s choice.

Five ‘Synchronize with Tempo’ buttons can be found in BigPicture Enterprise:

• in Administration > Workload Plans for Tempo workload schemes
• Administration > Holiday Plans for Tempo holiday schemes
• Home > Global teams for Tempo teams and their members
• Administration > Skills for mapping Tempo roles to BigPicture skills.
• Administration > Resource Manager for syncing resources. This one synchronizes all the above

This is one-way integration – from Tempo apps to BigPicture Enterprise. Once you have imported something to BigPicture, you can keep the “link”, or you can “unlink”, say the specific BigPicture item from the corresponding Tempo entity.

Putting things in a broader context

The Tempo – BigPicture integration is one of many bridges BigPicture has.

• BigPicture’s goal is to be a high-level portfolio management umbrella for popular work management tools. BigPicture already interconnects with Trello. Bridges to Azure DevOps Server as well as not just one but many-at-a-time Jira instances will follow. More on that in BigPicture integrations article.
• BigPicture recognizes native fields of third-party Atlassian ecosystem plugins, such as Advanced Roadmaps, Profields, ScripRunner, and many more. See the list
• API is available to those willing to create their own integrations. This is a private API, not guaranteed to remain constant over time, yet you are free to use it.