Enabling Collaboration Without Sacrificing Project Plan Integrity
Hello,
We're in search of best practices for allowing delivery team members to be able to add subtasks but without being able to adjust the parent projects or tasks that have been assigned to them. Here's what we are trying to achieve:
- Project manager builds a high level project plan consisting of the high level tasks, milestones, and sub projects and assigns each one to a delivery team member with a due date
- We'd like the delivery team members to be able to then build out the lower level tasks required to achieve what the project manager assigned them.
- The delivery team members, however, should NOT be able to edit the due date of the high level projects/tasks that were assigned to them and should NOT be able to mess up the PM's top level project plan.
- If the delivery team members' subtasks extend past the due date of the assigned project/task, we want this to somehow be flagged - since they'll be late in delivering.
Though points 1 and 2 seem straightforward, we're looking for insight on how we can enable points 3 and 4.
Steve Bercovici we were facing the same problem and a really good solution I do not know.
What we did:
Points 1 and 2 the same as you. But we do not allow team members to change dates in projects (via the Access Roles), but only the project manager.
The problem you have than ist, when the team mebers are making own tasks they are also not able to change dates of these tasks. The work around is to make the task in the private space (the team member) and link it to the project . As long as the team member has the task in the private space he can change dates. And if double tagged to the project also it also apperas in the project and the project manager can work on the task. Other team mebers can not change the dates as it is not tagged to their private space and they have not the rights in the project. When the team member no longer want to change dates he can detach the task from private space and he looses the rights. In this way the PM is sure nobody changes his project plan, but team members can manage their subtasks. Unfortunately this requieres quiet a lot of explanation because it is really a work around and no straight forward solution (like making access roles).
For your last point: use milestones. For dates which you need to keep use a milestone and make the tasks a predecessor of this milestone. As soon as the task expires the milestone you will see the connection in red in the Gantt Chart and alslo you can see it in the conflict monitor in dashboard. We arrange the tasks below milestones in our project structure, so you see clearly which tasks leads to which milestone.
Good suggestion, Sven Passinger!
I think that's exactly the way it is meant to be used. I even think double-tagging subtasks to a private space is not just a bad workaround, but a good solution. It could be handled easier than editig complex access roles, and every "delivery team member" is able to see directly if he has full rights of a task or not.
Florian
This is an interesting problem, and an intriguing solution from Sven! I would also be interested to see if anyone else has suggestions on this topic in case this is helpful for someone in my organization as well.
Thanks!
Thank you all for chiming in! I will give the private space solution a try. One thing that I'm wondering about with that option is the need for the PM to coordinate with each delivery lead and for the leads to add the personal projects into the corresponding project spaces. Meanwhile, here's the current setup that we're experimenting with:
- Created a space for the project and added all delivery leads and team members as read only / limited users. PM has full control.
- The project manager creates a high level project plan that is built primarily with projects that are assigned to the respective delivery leads with the corresponding due date. The delivery leads cannot edit that date due to their limited access.
- We then assigned the delivery leads and team members elevated access on the project that they are assigned to. The leads in turn create the tasks and subtasks and assign resources, dates, and dependencies.
- While the delivery teams can only edit their own tasks, the PMs have full visibility and control
- Created a landing page type dashboard for resources to see the projects and tasks assigned to them in the Space.
Would be very curious to hear any feedback.
Thx again!
Steve Bercovici I think your concept can work (as one can judge without knowing your concrete projects). If you have big projects a space per project sounds reasonable. Also the landing page per project sounds reasonable for big projects.
If you have smaller projects and team members working in several projects you should consider if a space per project or a space for severeal projects with sub-projects is the better way. Also if team members work in several projects I would recommend one dashboard over all projects for the team member.
I agree with all the solutions above as well - seems like a very interesting scenario. As a bonus - having the team members manage and plan their own subtasks (per se) helps increase their adoption to keeping things up to date as well!
Steve Bercovici I would never have thought of that. I will let me PM know of this workaround - thankyou
This has given me so much food for thought!! We've only recently started using spaces (never saw the need previously), but can see how utilising som eof the ideas above could help with some projects.