We nominate New Technologies as a winner of our Tickets contest because of the way they are using Assembla to increase their profit margins by tracking time invested in each project and performance against estimates. We thank them for sharing this with us.

Based in Argentina, New Technologies (www.newtechnologies.com.ar) designs, develops and maintains software solutions for enterprise portals, applications integration, Business Process Management, mobile applications, and Enterprise Resource Planning.

Every project gets its own Assembla Workspace to keep code, tasks, and documentation in one place. After a project has been defined, milestones are created for sprints, and tickets are created and assigned to the appropriate sprint using the Agile Planner. Project managers drag and drop tickets in and out of sprints to play “what if” games to see how many tasks can be included in each sprint. A backlog holds unassigned tickets to be used in future sprint planning.

“The Agile planner is very handy since it keeps the values in all the fields when creating new tickets within a sprint…and the estimated time remaining calculator allows us easily see how many tickets can fit into a sprint,” says Buisness Manager Carlos Montagut.

Every ticket or story is assigned a value (estimate) that is approved by the client. New Technologies uses a custom field to document this original estimate throughout the development process. Assembla Note: To make this easier, we have included this type of total estimate field in the most recent release, and in the next release, we will show sums of estimates on report headers and in the agile planner.

For every ticket, developers update the fields for new hours worked and estimated time remaining while working. The team uses the ticket list view with a custom filter set to show the columns for original estimate, invested hours, and work hours remaining. This ticket list configuration gives project managers an overview of how teams are doing relative to the original estimated time.

Carlos jokes: “It’s simple. Subtract invested hours and work hours remaining from the original estimate. If the answer is 0, you are on budget. If it is positive, you have spare hours. But if it is negative, you are in trouble.”

Time is exported using Assembla’s API and then uploaded into a database for billing and internal accounting purposes. Assembla Note: Time is also easily exportable in .cvs format from the Time Tool.

As a way to allow clients to easily submit requests, New Technologies has recently started using the Assembla Support Tool for current projects in development and in maintenance mode. The Support Tool gives clients a simple way to submit requests that can quickly be approved and assigned to a sprint.

According to Carlos: “We have tried other services, but Assembla provides the ticketing, management, and collaboration tools that work best for us.”

Configuration hints:

• Use a custom field for "original estimate" or the new built-in estimate types for time, points, or size - small, medium, or large.
• Saved filter to show estimated time to complete, hours invested, and original estimate to compare performance relative to the original estimated effort.