A Free To Use Montrose Product — Boomslang Tempo Notifications
TL;DR
Tempo Timesheets offer an outstanding and flexible timesheet management system that integrates perfectly with JIRA, but it cannot do your time logging for you. As a company that bills for our time, the biggest problem was to ensure our team remembers exactly what they worked on throughout the day, and to transfer this to Tempo while their memory is still fresh. Over the years, we have developed and improved on our internal notifications system, “Boomslang”, which helps us to do just that. It keeps our timesheets detailed, accurate, up to date, and transforms the way we use Tempo.
Overview
Over the years at Montrose Software, our engineers have provided IT services to many companies, ranging from big multinational corporations to small ambitious startups. Our most precious commodity is time, and we strive to make sure that the timesheets we submit to our clients are accurate, as there is no room for an error. After all, this is what our clients ultimately pay for.
With many individualities, while working under pressure to complete complex tasks, it is easy to forget about your timesheet. We’ve all been there, trying to remember what we did last week to make the timesheet correct. This can lead to inaccurate timesheets, which in turn, leads to inaccurate bills, which is something we want to avoid..
Our usual way of using Tempo, was to fill in the timesheet for the day before finishing the working day. It works most of the time, unless you forget to do it, and the next day you need to reconstruct the timesheet. Sometimes, the next working day is Monday, and after the weekend, it becomes harder to be precise about the work you’ve done on Friday. Sometimes you get caught up in work and a few days pass by,which then becomes a huge problem. Boomslang aims to change that.
Boomslang offers three distinct sets of notifications, which can be enabled depending on the way you work with your timesheet.
Notify if yesterday’s worklog is not filled
We developed this notification first, as this was something we already had in place via manual notifications on slack from our office admin. This aims to solve the issue of forgetting to fill your timesheet at the end of the day. So, when you sit down in front of the computer the following day, you’ll get a notification warning you that you have not filled in your timesheet for the previous working day. It figures out your working hours based on your preferences set in the “BOOMSLANG ACTIVE TIME” time section of the options page. By default, it will assume that you should have 8 hours logged each day. If, for whatever reason, one day you logged fewer hours than you should, since you had to go for a dentist appointment for example, on the next day Boomslang will keep notifying you, which you can quickly disable by using the “Last workday notification” toggle in the boomslang menu. Disabling that will cancel the “Yesterday’s worklog not filled” notifications for today.
Notify if I am not working on anything
This notification is tailored especially for the way we like to work with Tempo at Montrose. We found that having your timesheets filled at the end of the date for some of our employees loses a lot of detail that would’ve been logged otherwise. I, for example, have a very busy schedule helping with the company internal work, along with overseeing the needs of many different projects. I tend to switch between tasks a lot, and it is hard for me to keep track of it all at the end of the day. So, what I like to do, is to make sure that I always have a worklog in Tempo of what I’m currently doing.
Let’s imagine it’s Monday at 9AM, and my first task is to add a “Snooze” feature to the Boomslang project. I think the feature should take me two hours, so I open Tempo and add this ticket to my worklog for 2h, starting at 9AM, and get to work. If the two hours pass, and I’m still searching through Stack Overflow trying to figure out why this is not working, Boomslang lets me know my estimated time has finished. I can use the Boomslang menu, and with one click, extend the task by 30min, or click on the notification and edit my timesheet entry for another 2 hours if I need much more time. Once I finish coding the feature, commit it, and send it for review, I can go to Tempo and put my next task in.
Notify if task ends
Sometimes I like to plan my entire day up front in Tempo, while having my morning coffee. I would put all the tasks for the day with the estimated time I need to complete them. When each task ends and the next one starts, Boomslang will notify me of that change, and give me an option to extend the task I was working on. Normally, this type of planning never works down to the letter, and I use Tempo with Boomslang to adjust my estimates on the fly to match reality.
Last Words
We continue to extend Boomslang as an office pet project, and we like to share it with the rest of the Tempo community, to empower you to deliver perfect timesheets with Tempo without the need to remember to fill them out. With Boomslang notifications, I noticed that the way we use Tempo has changed, and it did so for the better. Always having a task you’re working on helps you to focus on that task. Planning the day of work ahead with Tempo, will give you a new perspective on how much work you can fit inside your working day, and trying to complete that day according to your plan, will make you realise estimates are rarely accurate, but Boomslang will help you adjust this plan on the fly, and take your time management and time tracking to a whole new level.
You can find Boomslang at:
Chrome web store https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/boomslang/hacphkcadmhclghdaikhnmliepcfdieo
Or
JIRA marketplace
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1222013/boomslang?hosting=cloud&tab=overview
