How to Customize Team Workflows: Advanced Use Cases

This article describes advanced use cases and troubleshooting strategies for the customization of team workflows:

• How to assign a single entity to two teams
• How to unassign a team from a team workflow
• How to delete a team workflow

Assign a Single Entity to Two Teams

To assign several teams to an entity each team must use a different team workflow. Targetprocess supports the scenario where teams work on the same item one after another (functional teams). A typical functional team consists of people performing similar functions. They are responsible for different phases of work and usually work organized sequentially as a pipeline.

• Each team must use its own team workflow working on this entity's project. It is not possible to assign teams if any of them use the project workflow instead of a team workflow.
• Assigned teams should be responsible for different parts of an entity’s workflow. Two workflows shouldn’t overlap with each other. They can overlap only when you have the Final state of the first team workflow with any number of states of the second team workflow.

See detailed descriptions of use cases to see how we recommend that you consider using team workflow setups.

Unassign a Team From a Team Workflow

A team cannot work without any workflow. They always use either a team or a project workflow. When you need to unassign a team from a current team workflow, you need to choose either another team workflow or the original project workflow.

In this example, to unassign the Alpha team from the Alpha team workflow we should choose the project workflow to be used by this team. Click on the Assign Team button next to the Project workflow of User Stories in the Development process. We can select any number of projects within which Alpha will use the project workflow.

A Team Cannot be Unassigned from their Team Workflow: IntersectionProblem

In Targetprocess it is possible to create entities assigned to two different teams in the same time. Say we have two teams: team Alpha and team Beta and there are Bugs assigned to both these teams.

If such entities exist, then both assigned teams must use their own team workflows for these entities, not a project workflow. This obstacle may prevent you from unassigning the teams from team workflows. You'll see an Unable to change team workflow error message in such case.

There is a workaround for this problem. Follow these steps to resolve it.

Let's say for bugs in the Core Development Project, you want to make team Alpha use the project workflow and keep Beta Team using the Team Beta Workflow.

• Find all bugs in project Core Development assigned to team Alpha and other teams. Filtered view may be used for this purpose.

  Advanced filter to show only bugs assigned to more than one team is the following:

  ?AssignedTeams.Count > 1

• Unassign shared entities from the team Alpha. Keep assignment to other teams.

  Or, alternatively,

  Unassign shared entities from all other teams but team Alpha.

  Batch action can be used for this purpose.

• Unassign team Alpha from its team workflow. Switch workflow for bugs in project Core Development assigned to team Alpha from Alpha Team Workflow to project workflow.

• [Optional] Assign bugs not assigned to any other team to team Alpha.

Delete a team workflow

To delete a Team Workflow, it must not be in use. Therefore in advance you must:

1. Find all teams that use this team workflow in some projects
2. In all these projects unassign teams from this team workflow. Switch these teams to some other team workflow or to project workflow.
3. Unused team workflow can be deleted. Open Process Setup screen. Find the team workflow you want to delete. Click on Edit.
4. Click Delete icon to delete the team workflow.