Team work with Sam

In the first Getting Started we followed the case of Ann, a product specialist, who uses Sam9000 to organize the different projects needed to develop a new line of product.

We saw what Ann would typically see and do in the first 10 minutes of using Sam.

• What Sam looks like when she first accesses it.
• How she creates new projects and adds new tasks to them.
• How she moves tasks to the Soon/Now column to indicate to the system which ones she will focus on.

Remember this last step is important to give Sam the indication to schedule these tasks.
Based on this indication, Sam will schedule the tasks and they will appear on Ann’s dashboard with other tasks from the other projects she is working on.

In this new Getting started session we will explore how Sam can help her collaborate with the three other coworkers in her team, Jennifer, drafting technician, John, ERP coder and Mike graphic designer.

Ann selects a Wish Start Date and assigns the task to Jennifer

What is the Wish Start date used for?
Ann knows that Jennifer will not be ready to provide these graphics for another week, but she still wants to make sure to think about it. To achieve this, she selects a Wish Start Date, for a week later, to delay the when the task is assigned.
Note :The system puts the task automatically back into the backlog.

She loves that! This allows her to organize whole projects and automatize the assignment of many tasks in advance. Doing this frees her mind from having to remember all the details and the following up.

Keep everybody on the same page.
In addition to be a self-organizing team, one of their challenge is having to deal with projects that constantly change. Having access to the same source of information becomes critical to adjust their plans effectively as a group.
Sales and marketing, for example, often make last minute changes to the content of the new line of products and this can have an impact on the priorities of their multiple projects.

Another challenge is their projects involve a fair amount of unknown when they start. As they progress on them, they discover areas that needs more attention and others that needs less. As a result, they often need to rebalance their priorities as a group.

Sam9000 has been designed for teams with these types of challenges in mind. Let’s see how it helps them handle their multiple projects with these fluid and evolving scopes.

In the Team Kanban below Ann and her coworkers can assess the situation at a higher level and see the progression of their multiple projects.
They can either choose to review this independently or as a group. At this higher level, they can check different items.

• Project status, preliminary, started, test/Deliver and Invoiced/Done
• Projects priorities (Pxx number above the Open button)
• The number of tasks inside of each project (the number on the right of Open button).
  

The Edit function allows them to access the project’s summary and adjust it. They can adjust the project’s priority, enter budget hours and monitor the actual hours worked from the timesheet.

From this higher level they can click on Open to see the tasks kanban level of each project. That is where they define and keep track of what to do for each person in each project.
Below the team is reviewing the 7 tasks from the Digital catalog Project card from the picture above.

Personal Kanban
The personal kanban is the consolidation of what Sam has scheduled for each member. The system uses the priorities indications at project and task level to determine that. This is what helps each member know what to should focus on at any given time.
Ann’s kanban for example indicates that today’s focus in the Started column is “Configure shower base accessories” and “Modifications to shower bases innova”.
She can also see what is coming soon in the column Scheduled By Sam.

Powerful Tools for Distributed teams and remote work
Having a distributed team environment is a situation that happens more and more frequently. It can be for variety of reasons and having a project system solution that supports it represents a big advantage.

This is Ann’s case. She negotiated to work from home four days a week which allowed her to move to a location that would have been too far to commute every day.

She uses Sam to stay in touch with the rest of the team and work on the projects. It feels as if she were at the office. At any time, Ann and her coworkers, can have a good idea of what is going on, each from their location.

They can use all the function we already discovered, Team kanban, Project kanban, assign each other tasks. In addition to these functions, they have access to many others that allow them to work together remotely. For example, as in the image below Ann can see more specifically what the rest of the team is doing with the Scheduled function filtered by users.

They can use Project Logs and Notes as communication tool.
    • Logs can be used to keep track of the different changes that happen during the project.
    • Notes as the one below is useful to document items specific to the ongoing project.

They use the Upload Files function to make files available to everyone, everywhere.