What is Tempo Folio?

Tempo Folio is a project and portfolio management add-on, that is anchored in many PMI concepts. It is meant to be used to:

Keep track of financial aspects (budgeted and actual costs and revenues) of projects
Provide objective information on performance and progress of projects with or without Earned Value Management indices
Provide project forecasts about time and money
Get an overview of collection of projects, a.k.a portfolios
Provide as much insight as possible over collected information with highly customizable reports

Key concepts

Now let's explain the most important terms you will encounter using Tempo Folio.

Folio: Tempo Folio's project

At the center of Tempo Folio is... the Folio! A Folio is simply a Project, in the usual meaning of Project Management:

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve specific goals. A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables), undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.

Source: Wikipedia

So a Folio is just that: a tool to manage funds invested to accomplish a goal (a set of issues) within a defined period of time, and to better predict how well the goals are to be met.

Then you might wonder: "why calling it a Folio and not a Project?" Simply because JIRA has its own definition of a project and already uses the term quite extensively. So to avoid confusion, we decided to simply name Tempo Folio's projects, Folios. You will see when creating a Folio that it can be associated with any number of JIRA projects.

See the documentation to learn how to create your first Folio.

Portfolio

Most organizations manage more than one projects and associate them with a number of portfolios (or programs). In Tempo Folio, a portfolio is simply a collection of Folios. It provides an overview on that collection of folios, like the overall budget, overall health and completion ratios, etc, allowing you to see the big picture, over any number of projects.

Expenditures, Expenses and Positions

Expenditures include all costs (planned or incurred) related to the accomplishment of a project's goals. In Folio, they are divided into Expenses and Positions. Expenses are all non human resource related costs, such as purchases of furniture, loan interests, rents, etc. Positions represent a specific team "slot", that are (or will be) filled by people, in this case JIRA users. Positions represent all human resource costs, more specifically salaries.

Scope

The Scope of a Folio is the objective of a project in terms of tasks to accomplish, features to develop, etc. Thus in JIRA terms, it is a collection of issues. JIRA allows you to define collections of issues through Filters that you can save and reuse in many ways. A Folio is always associated with a JIRA Saved Filter, determining its Scope. By tracking the progress of the issues that are part of this Scope, Tempo Folio can derive many project status information, such as its Completion Ratio, EVM indices, Time, Cost and Revenues forecasts, Team member workload, etc.

Earned Value

Earned Value is defined by the PMI as follows:

The budgeted cost of work that has actually been performed in carrying out a scheduled task during a specific time period.

Source: Wikipedia

In other terms, earned value is a portion of the budget that is "awarded" when a portion of the work has been completed. Thus in Tempo Folio, earned value is calculated as a proportion of the budget corresponding to the number of completed issues over all issues associated with the Folio. As an example: if a project (or Folio) has a budget of 100,000$ and contains 10 issues, one way to calculate the earned value is to count 10,000$ for each issue that is completed. Of course, Folio allows you to associate different weights to issues when calculating Earned Value by specifying a numeric issue field instead of simply using the issue count. We call this field the Earned Value Field. That way the earned value can for instance be computed based on Estimates in hours, Story points, Business Value, etc.

Earned value, along with budget and actual costs information can be used to calculate a series of indices (or metrics) that provide objective information on the general performance and progress of projects. These indices were defined as part of the Earned Value Management technique, a project management technique introduced by the US Department of Defence and that has since been incorporated in practices promoted by recognized project management institutions such as the Project Management Institute, PRINCE2 and the Association for Project Management.

The use of EVM is optional in Tempo Folio as you can turn it on or off on a per Folio basis, through the its configuration.

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