Best Practices on Roles, Teams, and User Assignment

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Best Practices: Roles, Teams, and User Assignment

This page will provide information on best practices to be followed for a role, user, and team assignment in SAP Cloud ALM.

What is a Person, a Role, and a Team in a Project ?

There are three levels of duties that you can manage in a single project: Person, Role and Team.

First, as you might already assume, Person is the one who is going to do a certain task. In other words, an individual member of a project is the Person, and in SAP Cloud ALM world, we call it “Assignee” or “User”.
Next, when you create a Project in CALM, it comes with a pre-delivered set of roles, Please refer to the basics of Project Management in SAP Cloud ALM . The Roles we are talking about here are Project Roles such as Project Lead and Business Process Expert. You can create a new custom project role in case you cannot find a proper one from the default list of Project roles. All of these default Project and custom Roles are termed as “Assigned Role” in SAP Cloud ALM in the Task Management screen. The difference from the Person is that multiple users can perform the same Role.
Lastly, a Team is a group of the Roles or Persons. How to organize a Team completely depends on project characteristics and your needs. You can utilize the “PMO team” only which is created by default, or you can create multiple teams in a same project to track various areas of work differently. Just remember that “PMO team” is special as

It is the only Team that contains the role “Project Lead”
It can not be deleted

Now, let us see briefly how we can see all these levels easily in the Task List page. It's simple. You can click Setting at the top right side of the Task List page, and add these three levels in your filter. You can also create and save this view to access this view conveniently.

Recommendations on how to work with Person, Role and Team

As we learned above, you, as a Project Lead, can assign different Person, Role and Team to each task to manage your project efficiently. This could be done in multiple ways depending on your specific strategy, but you can also think about some fundamental questions as follows.

How many teams or members need to engage in this project ?(e.g., a small-size project vs. a big-size project)
In which way you want the task to be done (e.g., explicit allocation to an individual member vs. implicit allocation to a team or a project role)

Keeping these questions in your mind, let us go over some specific user scenarios to give you some ideas to utilize this function.

First, suppose that you are a project lead of one small development project. You know every single member of the project and what they are doing. In this case, you don't need many different teams. You can simply have one PMO team and include all roles and members in this team. Furthermore, it would be easy to assign a certain task to a certain individual.

In the other scenario, let's say that you are a project lead of a very big scale project. You can create different teams and roles according to their functions and assign them at a rather high level instead of an individual level. For example, you can assign a set of tasks to a Development Team and allocate to each Role, without assigning a specific person.

You can also assign either a Team or a Role. In the case below, for example, any Analytics Expert in the project can work on the task. In this way, the team members can work on the task more autonomically depending on their workload and goal.

Instructions to assign / re-assign Team, Role and Person to Task

Here, let us see step by step how to assign and re-assign the Team, Role and Person to each task.

1) Team Assignment

Assigning a team to a certain task is simply done by clicking the drop-down menu of Team column in the Task List view. It can also be done in a detail view of each task.

2) Role Assignment (Assigned Role)

Assigning a project role can be done in the exact same way as we did for the team above: Doing it from the task list page or doing it from the detail page of each task.

3) Person Assignment (Assignee)

Assigning a specific person to a task can also be done in the same way we have learned so far. Different from the team and role that you can only choose from the closed list (default or custom), you can assign any person in your organization by searching function as below.

4) Re-assignment rules

You can always easily re-assign Team, Role and Person which have been already assigned. You can basically repeat what you have done before. However, there are some rules for re-assignment that would be useful for you to be aware of.

Let's say you have a project and set the Teams, Roles, and Assignees as you can see below from the table. You are Agatha, a Project Lead.

Team	Assigned Role	Assignee
PMO team	Project Lead	Agatha
PMO team	Business Process Expert	Rachel
Red team	Business Process Expert	Rachel
Blue team	Analytics Expert	Bob

And your current assignment status for three tasks is as follows. Please keep in mind that all changes will be made from this assignment status.

You can basically re-assign the Assignee to any other person, and the previous assignment of Team and Role remain same as before. As you can see below, when you change “Analytics Expert” from Bob to you (Agatha), the assignment of Team and Role remain same.

However, when you re-assign the Role, the Team assignment will be cleared if the new Role is not included in the Team. Now, you have re-assigned the Role from “Business Process Expert” to “Project Lead”. Because the Role “Project Lead” is not included in the “Red team”, the Team assignment is cleared.

Lastly, when you change the Team, the previous assignment to Role and Assignee will be cleared if they are not in the new Team. As the picture below shows, you've changed the Team from “PMO team” to “Red team”. Then, the previous assignment of Role and Assignee is all cleared, since the Role “Project Lead” and the Person “Agatha Bauer” do not belong to “Red team”.

Similarly, let's see what happen when you re-assign all of the tasks to “PMO team”. Then, the second task assigned to “Business Process Expert” and Rachel remains same, because both the Role and the Person belong to PMO team. However, the Assignee is cleared for the third task, since Bob does not belong to PMO team.