Teamwork

Teamwork Basics

Teamwork is a powerful project management tool which we have selected to use for communication, file sharing, and workflow organization. Throughout the onboarding process, teamwork will be the main tool for communication, supplemented with weekly meetings.

Every new idea, request, or question in teamwork needs to be tied to it's own task. This allows full visibility to the state of the project, and makes it easy to see changes and updates as tasks move across the board. This prevents questions from going unanswered or requests going unfulfilled due to the information being lost in an email inbox or in the comments section of an unrelated task. When in doubt, create a new task!

Creating a New Task

Begin by navigating to the board view and finding the column "New Tasks" on the far left.

Within this column you will find the + button to add a Task. Click this button.

Give your task a succinct title explaining the purpose of the task. An example would be “Change to milestone order” instead of “Milestone” or “Bug in LOS mapping” instead of “LOS”.

Click the save button to save the new task.

If the task requires additional information or associated files to be uploaded, click on the newly created task to open up the task details menu. Click "Edit Task".

The task details box will open, and you can enter additional information pertaining to the task.

Any files associated with the task should be uploaded in the "files" tab. This could include screenshots of reported bugs, PDF's of change requests, excel spreadsheets, etc.

Click "Save Changes" to save the description and files to the card.

Board View

The easiest way to quickly assess the state of the project and any outstanding tasks is the board view. To navigate to the board view, click on "board" as circled in the below screenshot.

Here you will see the columns of the board. The standard set of columns is New Tasks, Client to Complete, Ready for MH Review, MH Implementations, MH Development, Ready for Client Review, and Done. As a client, you can immediately know if there are any tasks which require your attention by looking in the "Client to Complete" and the "Ready for Client Review" columns. "Client to Complete" is for requests for necessary information before a task can be worked on, or for answering questions during the workflow process. "Ready for Client Review" is for tasks which have been completed and are awaiting a client's stamp of approval before being moved to done.

Tasks can be easily moved around the board by simply clicking on them and dragging them to a different column. It's important that tasks are moved whenever there is any action on the task (a new comment, a question, a new request, etc.) to provide optimal visibility to outstanding items needing attention. If there is a task in the "Client to Complete" column and the client provides additional information, they can move it to the "ready for MH Review" column to let us know to begin reviewing and working on the task at hand.

Once a task has been completed, the check mark next to the task title is clicked to indicate that it has been completed, and the card is moved to the Done column.

In the below example, with only a cursory glance we can see that we still need to discuss a launch date, two tasks have been submitted to Maxwell, Maxwell's implementations team is working on one task, Maxwell development is working on another, there is a task awaiting client review, the client is working on a task, and for tasks have been completed.

Task Details View

Clicking on a task on the board will open the task details view on the right side of the screen.

The task details view shows the title of the task, as well the the task column on the board.

Below the task title is the files associated with the task. For some tasks, there won't be any files. Files can be added to the task by simply dragging and dropping them into the files section.

Below the task files is the comments box, where comments can be added to the task.

Commenting on Tasks

Task comments allow for questions and updates to be communicated right in the task details panel. It's important to stay on topic and only discuss items related to the task at hand.

When commenting, you can "@" other teamwork users to send them a notification that the comment needs their attention. Though you can upload files to a comment itself, please refrain from this and instead upload the files to the files panel above the comments panel.

Below the comment you can see who will be notified by the comment. Teamwork will automatically populate this list with users who have been "@" in the comment, and with users from previous comments. It's good practice to make sure that the list of users being notified includes everyone who should be notified, and not users who this comment does not pertain to.

Below the notifications panel is the privacy panel. You can make a comment private and send it to a specific person, a specific organization, or to everybody on the project. It's important to double check that your comment is visible to the appropriate parties before posting.

Notifications

If you have been tagged in a comment or a task, you will receive a notification in the top right corner of the screen (the bell icon).

Clicking on this icon will bring up the notifications menu, which displays all unread comments. There is also an option to display read comments. Clicking on a comment will open the task associated with the comment.