Getting Started as a Site Administrator in Teamwork.com

Welcome to Teamwork.com! We’re here to help you create and track projects from start to finish. In Exploring the Fundamentals, we will take a look at the core structure and building blocks of Teamwork.com so you can set your team up for success!	Focus Areas
	◑ Introduction to Teamwork.com
	◑ Teamwork.com hierarchy
	◑ Core features and concepts
	◑ Inviting your team
	◑ Launching new projects

Introduction to Teamwork.com

Teamwork.com is a work and project management tool that helps in-house and remote teams improve collaboration, visibility, accountability and ultimately results. Use our feature-rich software to:

Deliver projects faster - manage your projects and deliver impactful results for your business.

Work together, seamlessly - make it easy for everyone to see what projects they’re working on, communicate with their team, and plan what comes next.

Automate project workflows - customize Teamwork.com to suit your needs.

Teamwork.com hierarchy

Teamwork.com is based around a hierarchy of information that forms the foundation for your projects.

Tasks & Subtasks: Tasks are the basic units of work that you and your team need to carry out. When more complicated workloads arise, you can break it down further by creating subtasks.

Task Lists: Task lists allow you and your team to easily group and manage related tasks. Each task in a project must be housed within a task list.

Milestones: A milestone marks a point of progress in your project such as the end of a phase of the project. You can attach one or more task lists to a milestone to show a set (or sets) of tasks that need to be completed in order to reach that milestone.

Projects: Each project you create is made up of all the components below it in the hierarchy: subtasks, tasks, task lists, and milestones. Your overall goal to complete the project by working through and completing each of these components, working from the lowest level of subtasks (if created) through to milestones.

Portfolio: You can use Portfolio view to see how any projects you may have running concurrently are progressing. Note: This feature is permission and price plan dependent.

Core features and concepts

Feature	Purpose
Assignment	Distribute project responsibilities through the assignment of tasks and milestones. - These can be assigned to individuals, companies, and teams on your site.
Following	Always keep up to date with important work through notifications by following project items.
Time tracking	Manage and report on the work carried out by your team through time logging.
Filtering	Drill down into areas across your site using filters to find the information most relevant to you.
Teams	Map your organization's structure by creating teams to group and interact with people on your site.
Advanced features for Grow and Scale subscriptions:
Custom fields	Track, manage, and filter information that’s unique to your business needs using project and task custom fields.
Budgeting	Set and track project budgets based on estimated time.
Portfolio	Get a panoramic view of your projects and which stage they are at.
Change history	Maintain full visibility by easily tracking changes made by team members to different project items.

Inviting your team

Let's explore adding your team to your site so you can start collaborating! Your owner company can be viewed and managed via the Companies subsection of the main People area, and would have been created during the initial setup of your site.

The owner company is designed to represent the core stakeholders of your organization - the employees in the day-to-day running of your projects. Further to the owner company, you can create additional external companies to group various clients and other contributors who may require a reduced level of involvement in any given project.

You can manage the users on your site on an individual company basis or by jumping to the People subsection. In the People subsection, just click Invite Users to get started. You can also click the arrow to the right of the button to add a single user.

After adding the relevant names and email addresses, you can select the company they should be associated with at the bottom. This is a quick and easy way to get your owner company populated with the key stakeholders in your team!

As well as choosing a company, you will be able to select a user license type to apply to the people you are adding. Depending on the role these users will play in your projects, you can choose the most relevant license type:

Standard users are the primary user type in Teamwork.com for those who need access to the full range of available permissions. Each standard user occupies a paid seat in your Teamwork.com subscription. Most often, these licenses would be reserved for your company's employees who are going to be managing and working on your projects in depth.
Client users can be used to bring clients into your projects where necessary, without incurring extra costs onto your subscription. They can avail of the same range of project level permissions as standard users but cannot perform any administrative actions on your site. They are limited to being a member of a maximum of active five projects.

Note: Client users cannot be part of the owner company.

Collaborators are designed for bringing in third parties to your projects in a limited capacity. They can perform basic actions such as complete tasks assigned to them, add comments & messages, or view files. Like client users, collaborators are completely free on your subscription but their permissions are less expansive.

You can explore user license types and permissions further here!

An optional additional step in the invite process will be to add the users to some projects. You can always skip this and add them in later.

The final step is to send the invites, adding a custom message if you wish.

Teams

Taking people management a step further, you can leverage the Teams feature to replicate your organization's structure and group people on your site based on their position or contribution. Depending on your needs, you may have different people who take up multiple roles. This can easily be mapped with Teams, as individuals can exist in multiple teams.

Any site administrator or user with permission to manage people & companies can create and manage teams on your site via the People area.

Each team you create can be given a meaningful name, handle (more on that later!), and custom logo, making them easily distinguishable. Using the enhanced people picker, you can select the relevant people to add as members of the team.

Subteams

You can achieve a deeper level of granularity by further splitting out your teams into subteams. With the added layer of subteams, you can do things like send a message to the entire team updating them on the project schedule, while only assigning your developers to a bug that needs to be fixed!

Below, you will see a few examples of team/subteam structures. Depending on how you operate, you may decide to structure one team based on role, while another is based on location. It's entirely up to you!

Parent team	Marketing	Support	Product
Subteams	- Design	- Cork support	- Frontend
	- Website	- Belfast support	- Backend
	- PR	- Support content	- API
	- Product marketing		- Designers
	- Digital marketing		- Testing

When adding members to a subteam, they will automatically become members of any teams above them in the team's hierarchy. You will still be able to mention and assign the subteam independently.

Note: Subteams are available on the per-user Premium/Grow plans and above.

Adding a project

Now things really start to get interesting - adding custom projects to your site.

To do this, click the Jump to option in the left navigation menu, then click the + icon in the top right of the slide out panel.

In the Create a Project modal, you can start from scratch with a blank project. Click Next step to proceed through the remaining project options.

For sites with access to the project template feature, you can also create new projects directly from a template.

For step by step information on the process of creating a project, check out our help article here.

Setting milestones

As mentioned in the hierarchy section, milestones can represent phases or target points of your project by which time certain works should be completed. With the added ability to associate task lists with milestones, you can easily gauge how on track things are to reaching each outlined milestone.

When the milestones feature is enabled for your project, you will see a Milestones tab in the project's main navigation menu. Click the Add Milestone button to create a new milestone.

For each new milestone you create, you can set a name, due date, and person responsible. Other options include to notify, send reminders, add a description, set privacy and followers, and apply tags.

Task lists can be attached to a new milestone as you create it. Select the Task Lists tab in the Add a New Milestone modal.

For existing milestones, hover over the milestone to reveal a task lists dropdown. You can then select one or multiple task lists to attach.

Once you have attached a task list, a progress bar will be visible above the task list title(s). The progress completion of the milestone will be increased each time a task from the attached list(s) is completed. Each individual task and subtask in the attached task list(s) will count towards that milestone's progress.

Completing all tasks in the task lists attached to a milestone will not automatically complete the milestone. Milestones can be marked as complete by selecting the checkmark to the left of the milestone title.

An important note for the milestone-task list relationship is that while multiple task lists can be attached to one milestone, each individual task list can only be associated with one milestone at any one time.

In the project's List view, any task lists that have milestones attached will display a milestone banner below the task list title. Any tasks within the task list that do not have their own due date explicitly set will automatically inherit the due date of the attached milestone.

Creating a task list and tasks

Now that your project is set up, let's jump into the List area of the project. Task lists are the building blocks of your projects. Without task lists, you can't have tasks!

When you create a new project, it will have a task list created by default to help kick start your workflow. To add your own list, just click the Add Task List button in the top right.

A name is all that's required to create your task list. If you'd like to expand the task list further, just navigate through the various tabs in the task list window. You can use the Milestone tab here to associate a milestone with the task list.

Click Add Task List to create the list and start creating tasks for your team to collaborate on.

Tasks

Tasks are a great way to break down your team's workload into manageable pieces. Each task can be assigned to the relevant members to work on and complete.

To try it out for yourself and create a task. Giving the task a name is all that's required. Using the dropdown list, you can also pick a member of your team to be responsible for the task. Don't forget to click Create Task to add the task to the list!

Subtasks

While a task list can be used to group associated pieces of work, you may need to break things down even further.

Through the use of subtasks, you can easily divide a task into smaller pieces and also assign responsibility for each subtask to different users if you wish.

This can be achieved by adding subtasks to your tasks. Hover over a task and click the subtasks icon to open the subtasks area. You can then click Add Subtask to start nesting tasks within your parent task.

Repeating tasks

Beyond tasks and subtasks, there may also be occasions where you have tasks that need to be performed multiple times during a project's lifecycle. Rather than having to manually create the tasks each time you need them, you can set the original task to repeat.

With repeating tasks, any task that has a due date can then be set to repeat ad specific intervals. Each time the current task is marked as complete, the next task in the series will be created automatically. While creating or editing your task, go to the More tab and select the Repeats option.

Using the Does this task repeat dropdown, you can choose an interval such as daily, weekly, monthly, or every x number of days/weeks. Once selected, you will be able to customize the settings further based on the interval selected.

Dynamic assignment

Leveraging the dynamic assignment feature in Teamwork.com, you can assign various items based on team or company.

Dynamic assignment can be utilized in the following ways:

Assigning tasks and milestones.
Setting privacy on project items.
Adding followers to project items.

Assigning an item to a team or company acts as a dynamic assignment. This means that if more members are added to that team or company in the future, they will automatically be assigned to the item. Likewise, they will be removed from the assignment if they are removed from the team.

One thing to note is that for tasks assigned to a team or company, you won't be able to generate separate tasks for each team/company member via the Create a task for each assignee option.

For more information, see: Getting Started with Teams