The Planning Maze no one talks about: and how TIMETOACT solved it

Written by catworkx | Apr 2, 2025 2:38:58 PM

Imagine this: You're a project manager planning a cross-functional sprint with five people from three different teams. First, you open your HR tool to check who's on vacation. Then you switch to your calendar app to find available time slots for meetings.

Next stop: your project tracking tool — maybe Jira — to see how overloaded your team already is. Missing something? Sick days, partial availability, different time zones, and perhaps that one Excel sheet someone swears is "the single source of truth."

Now repeat this process for every team member. Every week. For every sprint or project.

Welcome to the maze of resource planning.

Teams often have to jump between disconnected systems just to answer a simple question:

At TIMETOACT GROUP, we’ve been working to simplify that maze, because with over 1,400 team members, resource planning had become an administrative minefield: time-consuming, error-prone, and stressful for everyone involved.

The Challenge: A fragmented view of availability

Before integrating Personio and Atlassian Cloud, project managers and team leads at TIMETOACT Group faced a daily uphill battle to get clear answers:

Searching for availability across tools

To check who's on vacation, sick, or only partially available, you had to log into several systems - some of which weren't even accessible to project leads. Real-time visibility was a myth.

Isolated HR and project data

Even though Personio had accurate absence data, tools like Jira and Tempo - used for resource planning - lacked crucial context. Planners were often flying blind.

Too many variations of work schedules

With over 280 work schedules for 1,400 employees, managing working hours and days became a true spreadsheet workout.

Manual effort at every step

Copying work schedules and absence information into project tools took hours every week - for project managers, HR, and IT alike.

Misalignment risks

Teams were overbooked, sprints had to be rescheduled, and critical capacity was misjudged — all because no one had the full picture.

The result? Delays, frustration, and thousands of hours lost to unnecessary admin work.

The Solution: Automated HR data sync with Atlassian Cloud

TIMETOACT GROUP integrated Personio with Jira Cloud and Tempo apps to enable seamless workforce planning across the company.

Here’s how the integration works:

Team members, including their work schedules and any planned or unplanned absences, are automatically synchronized from Personio to Jira Cloud. This integration keeps data synced, streamlining team availability and planning.

Absences appear in Jira’s work management tools, helping project managers optimize team allocation and timelines. To protect privacy, they’re labeled only as “planned” or “unplanned,” answering the key question: “Is this resource available, and when?”.

Tempo’s and Yasoon’s M365 calendar integration eliminates surprises from pre-scheduled meetings, travel time, and other blockers — all now visible in the Tempo Capacity Planner, and continuously updated thanks to Yasoon’s task planning integration.

With this real-time automation in place, project managers now have full visibility into team availability, removing the need for manual HR data updates.

The Impact: Time savings and improved planning accuracy

Let’s be honest, planning is hard work, and tools or integrations won’t do the job for you. Maybe AI will help in the future, but for now, it would first need to understand each team member’s skills and strengths to be truly helpful.

That said, we’ve laid the foundation for smoother planning, and the real challenge is driving this change throughout the organization. After all, every project manager has their favorite spreadsheet (a topic for another article). But here are some benefits we’re already seeing:

The Bottom Line: Navigating the planning jungle with smart integrations

By integrating Tempo Timesheets, Tempo Capacity Planner, M365, and Yasoon’s M365 integration with Personio, TIMETOACT GROUP has dramatically reduced the workload tied to resource planning.

A huge thank you to the amazing teamwork and the outstanding tools that made all this possible:

Atlassian with Jira.
Tempo with Tempo Timesheets & Tempo Capacity Planner.
Personio as our global HR tool.
TIMETOACT for building the middleware.
And of course, our amazing catworkx team for the configuration and onboarding support for all our colleagues.

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