How to customize Team Workflows

The team workflow is a sub-workflow of a main project workflow, and it is associated with a team. Team workflows are used when there are multiple teams working on the same projects (or projects which use the same process) and teams prefer their own way to work on items. This allows teams to follow their real life workflows and help project managers easily track the progress across all the teams not being confused about each team's specific workflow. Learn more in Project and Team Workflows overview article.

Continuous Team Workflows for teams collaborating in sequence are available starting from version 3.8.2.

Create a team workflow

As an example we use two teams – Alpha team and Beta team – who are working on the same projects.

Each team has a custom workflow and works on its own set of user stories from a project backlog.

First, to create a team workflow, you need to have teams in your account. Here is an article that describes more about how to create teams.

At the project level, we want to see user stories from a project perspective. We need to know which user stories are in Open state, In progress and Done. Thus we have our Project Workflow for a user story and can set it up on the Process Setup screen.

The Alpha team prefers to have more user stories statuses to track their work adding to its team workflow. To create a new Team Workflow click the Add Team Workflow button and map your team states to project states.

Click on Save changes and the Alpha team workflow is ready to be used. Beta team uses a slightly different flow: “Planned – In Dev – Testing – Done”. Now there are two team workflows mapped to the project workflow ready to go.

When mapping team workflow states to project workflow states you can start from any project state, but there cannot be any gaps in a team workflow. You should map all team states that are between the Initial and Final team states of the Team Workflow to the corresponding project states. The team can use the view with project states to see items outside of its workflow.

In our example, the Beta team workflow isn’t mapped to the Open project state and starts from the Planned project state. However, there cannot be a gap skipping the In Progress project state in the middle of the team workflow.

Other operations you can do with team states:

• Add/Edit/Delete a state
• Change the order of states and their mapping to project states
• Mark a state as planned. It means that the Cycle Time will start when an entity leaves this state.

Roles, Email Notifications, States Transitions are not supported for a Team Workflow so far. Let us know if you want to raise its importance for implementation by adding your vote for a corresponding idea.

Assign a team to a team workflow

The exclamation sign near the Assign team button means that a team workflow is not used by any team in a company.  Until then both teams use the Project workflow on all of their projects by default.

When you assign a team to a new project it uses a workflow that is used by this team in more than 80% of other cases. If you want to set a default team workflow manually let us know your case leaving your vote and comments for the corresponding idea in our system.

The next step is to assign the workflows to teams. Click the Assign team button to select a team or teams, who would like to use a workflow.

A list of available teams includes teams assigned to any project of a corresponding process.

In the example above there is no Beta team among available teams because it is not assigned to any project which uses the Development process.

Select a Team and choose on which projects this team will use this team workflow. Under Projects assigned to Alpha team there are all projects which use the Development process and this team has been already assigned to. There is just one project in the example below.

Also, you can see other projects from the Development process which this team hasn’t been assigned to yet. By selecting any project you both assign a team to a project and specify a team workflow for this team on this project.

A team can use different workflows on different projects. A team workflow can be used by many teams on different projects.

Now, on the process setup screen we can see if a team workflow is in use and who is using it.

In the example above, the Alpha and the Beta teams can not be assigned to the same user story as their workflows are overlapped in more than one state. Only teams responsible for different segments of workflow may work on the same work item. You can read about possible setups here.

Use of Team and Project Workflows

Now we can look at user stories from different perspectives - a project point of view and a team point of view. To see user stories from a project point of view we select States as vertical lanes.

As a result we see project states on a board.

To see the flow of the Alpha team let's select Team States as vertical lanes and select Alpha team in a project/teams context.

Now when we move a card from one state to another on a team board (with a team workflow), it's moved appropriately to the mapped state in the project workflow, so that people who look at user stories from a project perspective see when the user story state is changed and when a team changes it on their board.

When a user story is moved between project states it is automatically moved to the first mapped team state in a project state.

To see the flow from the Alpha team perspective select Alpha team in a project/teams context.

When we open a user story, which is moving according to team workflow states, we'll see these states shown under appropriate project states in the state selector.

A team workflow can be used by many different teams on different projects. To do this just select an appropriate team workflow to be used as an entity workflow for a project.

Troubleshooting

See Also

• How to customize Team Workflows: advanced use cases
• Team Workflow Metrics and Reports