team [teem]
noun
a number of persons associated in some joint action
source
Of course, we all understand what a team is—a group of people working together on a project or toward some common goal. While defining one is simple, figuring out how they need to work together to be successful is a little more complex.
There is a whole science behind team management, involving intricate details, complex challenges, and various methodologies around understanding how humans work together. On top of that, every organization is unique, which means there isn’t a magic formula that tells you how to structure a good team.
But luckily, there is TaskRay, which can help mitigate some of the complexities of team management. Having the right tools to manage work is essential for success, and knowing how to use those tools effectively will help you fast-track those positive outcomes. With that in mind, let’s talk about some of the best practices and features around team management in TaskRay.
Starting with the basics, you will need to make sure that your team members are set up correctly according to their job responsibilities by configuring all the necessary roles involved in managing work in TaskRay (e.g. Implementations, Customer Success, etc.). Next, you will assign those roles out to TaskRay team members. Here, we recommend keeping things simple and only creating the roles that will correlate with the work that will be managed out of TaskRay.
TaskRay Pro Tip: As an ongoing best practice for the future, remember to assign roles to all new TaskRay team members whenever they are first set up.
Now that the necessary roles are set up and linked to TaskRay team members, let’s explore how that will help you manage project teams. When structuring new projects or building out project templates, roles can be used for placeholder assignments on tasks.
Let’s say that you are working on building out a new project template to manage onboardings for new customers. As you map out all the different activities involved in the onboarding process, you likely have a general idea of how all the responsibilities will be distributed whenever new projects are created from the template. For example, your onboarding process incorporates some technical implementation tasks, which are typically managed by the Implementations team. Or perhaps you have some customer check-in calls which are typically the responsibility of the Customer Success team. You know that these teams have multiple members and it is guaranteed that every onboarding project will involve a mix of different people from those teams.
So, what do you do? Well, you can assign roles as placeholders to the tasks within the template. With this approach, the technical implementation tasks can be assigned to the Implementation Manager role, and the customer check-in calls can be assigned to the Customer Success Manager role. This makes the template dynamic for creating new projects.
This brings us to the other area where roles are key: task assignments on actual projects. Let’s say that you are getting ready to onboard a new customer, so you clone the previously built template to create a new project to manage the process.
The newly created project is essentially a copy of the template, including all those role placeholder assignments on tasks. Now that you have a project to manage the onboarding for the new customer, you can quickly distribute all the task assignments to the applicable team members according to their respective roles. For example, all the Implementation tasks can be assigned to the Implementation Manager who will be part of the project team. Similarly, all the Customer Success tasks can be assigned to the designated Customer Success Manager who will be monitoring the onboarding process and working with the customer long-term. In just a few clicks, your new project is ready to go!
Now you are set up for success with a repeatable process for onboarding new customers. Using the same template, you can continue making new onboarding projects and dynamically allocating responsibilities to the necessary team members within each iteration of the project.
Once you have your process fully defined and have a well-structured foundation in place, you can automate some of the steps, such as assigning tasks to team members on new projects based on their roles.
Let’s use the onboarding process as an example here as well. Previously, we demonstrated the manual process of assigning out tasks on the new project team. By leveraging automation tools in Salesforce (i.e. Flow), it is possible to define criteria for automating these steps. When a new project is created, the automation can be triggered to reassign all Customer Success tasks to whoever the assigned Customer Success Manager is on the new account. Similarly, all Implementation tasks within the project can be assigned to the allocated Implementation Manager.
With that said, this is just one example of how the criteria can be defined. If you have different requirements for such reassignment, you can work on defining the criteria accordingly. If you are thinking about automating, keep this in mind: as long as you have a well-defined foundation and mapped-out process, you should be able to define criteria for automating team assignment.
Throughout this blog post, we discussed some of the key functions in the TaskRay app for managing teams. We encourage you to give them all a try so you can get a feel for what works best for your own work management process.
Remember that these are just the basics and we have other tools in store that will help address some of the other complexities of team management. With TaskRay’s resource planning and team member attributes added to the mix, you can rest assured that your projects will always be taken care of. Be sure to keep an eye out for other TaskRay features and best practices around team management!
Note: The functionality discussed in this blog post applies to Standard and Premium editions of TaskRay.
