Teams

Teams provide a mechanism for associating items such as stories, bugs, risks, or issues to groups within your organization in addition to (or instead of) assignment directly to a team member. Most screens within the application can then be sorted, grouped, or filtered based on team assignments, providing a rich experience for team-based work flows.

 

Defining Teams

To create, edit, or delete teams, visit the Define Teams page, which you can navigate to by clicking on the Define Teams ribbon button within the Settings tab.  To manage teams you must have permission to edit project settings.  If the Define Teams button is not visible, you may not have have this permission in the current project.

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Creating a new team is quite simple: press the Add Team button, type a desired team name into the new row that appears in the grid, and press enter.

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If you wish to edit the name of a team, highlight the row and then either:

  1. Press F2; or
  2. Single-click

This will take the row into edit mode. From there, type out the name you desire and press enter, just as in creating a team. This will confirm the change. Pressing esc will undo any unconfirmed changes and exit edit mode on the row.

Deleting a team requires selecting the row in the grid, then pressing the Delete Team button. You will be asked to confirm the deletion, at which point you can cancel or continue. Any items that were associated with the deleted team will be given a blank association.

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Associating Teams to Work Items

Stories, Bugs, Risks, and Issues will allow you to associate a team to a particular item. Creating the association is as simple as selecting the desired team from the provided dropdown box within the properties panel of the item you are editing.  If you don't have permission to edit the item, you will not be able to change the team assignment.

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To remove an existing association, you may either select a different team from the list or use the clear button within the dropdown control.

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Consuming Teams

Teams can be consumed in 3 basic ways within TeamPulse: sorting, filtering, and grouping. Using the techniques described below can help greatly with team-based planning and execution.

Sorting

Sorting information by team can often be helpful when viewing work in a current iteration, in order to see which teams are working on what. For this example we will look at the Progress Grid, a link to which can be found in the Current Iteration Views section of the Tracking ribbon tab.

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If the Team column is not currently visible within the grid, it can be added by pressing the Edit Columns button in the upper-right area of the grid and selecting Team from the list of available columns.

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When the Team column is visible, simply click the column header once to sort in ascending fashion, a second time to sort descending, and a third time to remove the sort from that column.

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Filtering

Much like sorting, filtering can be used within the grids to further enhance team-based information gathering. To filter out items based on their associated team, first ensure that the Team column is visible within the grid, as explained in the steps above for sorting.

When the Team column is visible, click the small filter icon in the column header to reveal the filter dialog. This filter provides a very powerful mechanism for determining match criteria. In the example below, Team1 is chosen as the filter criteria and the dialog is then closed via the small x icon.

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After closing the dialog the results of the applied filter can be seen, resulting in a much less cluttered view for dealing with information relating strictly to Team1.

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A filter can be removed by pressing the Clear Filter button on the filter dialog.

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Grouping

Grouping by Team is another great way to consume information by team. Grouping is available within the grids as well as in the Story Board and the Task Board.

To group by Team within a grid, once again ensure the Team column is visible as per the steps for sorting. When the column is visible, click and drag the column header upwards into the grouping area provided.

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It is now possible to expand and collapse the groups to see information on a per-team basis.

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To remove a grouping, place your mouse over the column rectangle in the grouping area and press the small x icon that appears.

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Viewing the Story Board or Task Board grouped by Team is another valuable tool. For this example we will use the Story Board, but the Task Board grouping functions in the same way. To view the Story Board, click the button in the Current Iteration Views section of the Tracking ribbon tab.

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On the Story Board screen use the Group By drop down and select the Team item from the list.

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This will now show the Story Board grouped by Team.

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To remove the grouping, select the None option from the Group By drop down list.

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