How a Delivery Plan Works

This section explains how the planned data from the Delivery Plans are consumed based on the worklogs and work rates and how the users can track the service progress/consumption from them.

Understanding the Data Hierarchy

Before going through the Delivery Plans functionality, it is important to know how the system handles the overall information. Although the Delivery Plan is the key entity, there are other entities that surround it and which are important to obtain meaningful information related to services consumption and comparison between planned and executed. The diagram below exemplifies this structure:

Customer: represents the customer (internal or external) that will have delivery plans created for. A customer can have many different plans to specify different service types, activities or date ranges.

Delivery Plan: A Delivery Plan defines the service agreement with your customers. It helps in managing how customers are charged for services or activities you execute. The delivery plan is also responsible for tracking the status of the agreement. In summary, the delivery plan is the main entity that concentrates the information related to the services or activities planned, such as the responsible for that plan, start and end dates, recurrence, amount of planned hours, value, billing model, etc.

Accounts: responsible for classifying the services inside a delivery plan. You can add up to 6 accounts per plan. They can be billable or non-billable and assigned to specific teams that will execute the service. The total for billable accounts should always match the planned hours informed for that particular delivery plan.

Account Slices: used whenever a service/account has to be executed by more than one team. The number of hours for each account (for Time & Materials plans) can be distributed among up to 4 different teams and the sum of the slices should match the total defined for that particular account. For Fixed-Price plans, you can also distribute the work among up to 4 different teams. The difference is that there is no hours or values distribution among them.

Issues: These are the Jira entities created to describe the tasks executed by the users. When editing an issue, it is necessary to inform the delivery plan and account to be considered for that issue, so the system will know to what account/plan the worklogs should be considered for. There is no restriction on the number of issues created for an account.

Worklogs: time logged by the users in Jira whenever they work on that particular task/story.

Processing the Delivery Plans

Please, refer to the Create a Delivery Plan section for detailed information.

When a delivery plan is created for a customer, the system will use the issues or worklogs added against its accounts to track progress/consumption, depending on the billing model defined (hours or fixed-price).

Billing Model

Behavior

Hours

When this option is selected, the system will count every hour logged for issues under the respective delivery plan/account and compare them with the planned hours informed on the delivery plan, since they are logged within the delivery plan start/end date ranges.
If the user who has logged the time is also enrolled in a Team, the system will consider this information to show the team distribution (slices) time spent on the related reports.

Fixed-Price

When this option is selected, the system will calculate the number of hours logged in issues for that particular delivery plan/account x the work rates for that particular team member, then compare with the delivery plan value, since the issue creation date is within the delivery plan start/end date ranges.

The system only starts counting issues, rates or worklogs when the respective delivery plan status is changed from DRAFT to ACTIVE.

Recurrence

In case you have customers whose has recurring services, the system allows to manage delivery plans in two different ways, with specific behaviors:

Recurrence Type	Behavior	Comments
None	In this case, the system will understand that the delivery plan simply starts and ends in a specific time range, defined by start and end dates. Planned hours/value will be considered for calculations only once, given the dates informed. Account slices will also be calculated once, until the end date. Delivery plan expiration rules work normally after the end date is reached and it is still ACTIVE.
Monthly	The system will understand the delivery plan's amount of hours/value should be repeated monthly until the end of the plan. When you inform a monthly recurrence, the total planned hours/value will become monthly and a new field will be displayed to show the total amount for the delivery plan, given the number of months inside the start/end dates range. Examples: Time & Materials (hours) plans: if the period inside the start/end dates range is 4 months and you inform 100 hours per month, then your total planned hours will be 400 hours until the end date as shown below: Fixed-Price plans: if the period inside the start/end dates range is 4 months and you inform $1,000.00 per month, then your total planned hours will be $4,000.00 until the end date as shown below: Account slices will also be monthly calculated, until the end date. Delivery plan expiration rules work normally after the end date is reached and it is still ACTIVE.	You cannot have a delivery plan without an end date. Even the recurring ones should have a start and end date. After the plan time ends, you should add a new plan if you want to continue with the services for this customer/account.