Working with your Teams

Strategy works better when we work together as a team. 

We, at Cascade believe in teamwork and collaboration to deliver and achieve wonderful things, and so here is a space where you can make things happen as a team.

From the left navigation pane, click Plans and teams, and click All teams tab.

Click + New team. You can also create a team by clicking on the icon from the global navigation bar (on top right of the page), and then clicking Create team.

In the Create new team window,

• Enter the team name,
• Add existing members from the list or invite new members (See Invite new members for details),
• Select a parent team if you need to be aligned under one or leave it blank, and
• Assign team ownership to someone else. By default, whoever creates the team will be the owner of it unless changed. Manager role users can assign team ownership to someone else only while creating. Otherwise, they can do it only for the teams that they own.
  By default, the team owners become the owners of the plan that the team is assigned to.
• Click Save.

Once the team is created, it gets added under My teams on the left navigation pane. My teams also lists the teams that you are part of. 

The Teams function in Cascade is an awesome all-in-one hub area where you can see everything your team is working on.

In the Teams Home page, you can add your team's vision and mission statement, values, description about the team, add/manage plans, add/remove team members, and view/post updates.

You can have separate plans for your teams - Click Add new plan (See Create Your Plan) or Import existing plan (See Import Your Plan), depending on your requirement. Click on a plan to view its components from Planner page. 

To assign a team to an existing plan:

• Click the three dots against the plan name, and select Plan settings. 
• Click + Assign to team in the All Plans page or Planner page if there's no team assigned to a plan.
• Choose the relevant team from the drop-down list against the Team field.

The team will be assigned to the specific plan and this plan will be listed under the Plans section in that Team's Home page. See How to Assign a Team to a Plan? for more details.

How to edit the team details?

In the Teams Home page, click the name of your team to edit the name. Or, you can click the three dots against the name:

• Edit Team Settings to change the name, add/remove owners and team members, and add/remove parent team.
  
  While Manager role users (as team owners) can add people outside of the workspace to their team, contributor users (as team owners) can only add people who're already part of the workspace (invited or enabled) to their team.
• Delete the team - Once deleted, the team will be deleted permanently from the workspace. However, if this team is a parent to some other team, then deleting it will make you to either un-align other team's plans or assign them to a new team. 
  
• Copy Team link to share the link with someone, who can then view your team page and your plans.
  Irrespective of access, anyone in the workspace can copy a team link to be shared with others.

Click the star icon against the team name either in the Teams Home page or in the All Teams page to mark it as your favorite.

How to remove yourself or someone out of the team?

• You can click Leave against your name to move out of this team, and on confirmation, this teams will be removed from the My Teams page as well. 
• If you are the Owner of the team, when you click Leave, it will prompt you to assign a new owner. Only when it's done, can you leave the team.
• You can also remove some other team member. Under the Team Members area, click See All. In the Team Members tab, click the three dots against the name of the person you wish to remove, and click Remove. On confirmation, this user will be removed out of your team.

In all the above scenarios, the removed person loses the accesses that they had as a team member with regards to the plans assigned to that team unless they're the owner or collaborator of a goal in that plan. For example, if the team had view access to a private plan, then the removed team member will lose view access to the plan unless they're the owner or collaborator of a goal in that plan.

Post team updates and collaborate:

The Updates tab in your Team's page lets you to create updates so that everyone in your team are aware of the progress. You can post short messages and videos here. Click Post an Update and in the Post an Update dialog box, give a title and write your message (use headlines, paragraphs, apply styles and bullets), attach videos (insert or copy-paste the video link here), and click Post Update. The update gets posted.

If you're posting an update for a team from the Home page, you can choose the relevant team from the Select a team dropdown list once you click on the Post a team update.

Anyone in the workspace can add comments to your updates, and if the notifications are enabled, you'll receive notifications that someone has commented in your update.

You can view the updates from

• Team's Update page (Shows only the specific team's updates made by its team members)
• Team's Home page (You can also post updates from here.)
• Recent Updates area of Home page (Shows all the recent updates posted in your workspace)

If you wish to see a specific team's update, then you need to navigate to that team via the Teams tab of the Plans and Teams page, and click the Updates tab of that team.

The updates are posted under the Recent Updates area of your Home page. You can filter them either to view all the updates in your workspace or to view just the team updates posted by different teams.

On integration with Slack (Integrate Slack with Cascade), you can receive notifications on team updates when the Cascade bot is added to the relevant slack channel.

A few points to note:

• Admin role users can create, edit, manage and delete teams.
• Manager role users can create teams and add members from outside the workspace too.
  • If they're the owner of a team, then they can edit, manage and delete that team - they can add or remove team members.
  • They can add a new plan or post updates to their team.
• Contributor role users cannot create new teams.
  • They can be made owners to a team by an Admin or Manager role user.
  • If they're the owner of a team, then they can edit, manage and delete that team. In this case, they can also assign someone else ownership of the team.
  • They can add only those people who're already part of the workspace (invited or enabled) to their team.
  • They can add new plans and post updates to their teams.
• Viewer role users cannot create new teams. They cannot edit or delete teams even if they're the owners of a team. However, we'll be working to remove assigning ownership of a team to a viewer role user in the near future.

 FAQs

Who is in charge of the Team?

A Team consists of a group of people working together - there is no hierarchical structure in place within the team. However, any Cascade admin or manager within your organization will be able to add teams. Anyone who is the owner of the team will have the ability to edit, manage and delete the team and they can be an Admin, manager or a contributor role user. If its a contributor, then they should be made the team owner by an Admin or Manager. This role can be swapped over to someone else if necessary.

What can individuals do within the Team?

Anyone in the team will be able to edit the plans the team has access to, as long as the plan is not private. You’ll also be able to create or edit the team’s principles (i.e. mission statement and values).

How many teams can a user be part of?

A user cannot be a part of more than 50 teams. 

Who can delete a Team?

Only the team owners (except for "Viewer" role users) or an Admin user can delete a team.

Can one user be in multiple teams?

Yes. One user can be assigned to and interact within multiple teams at the same time.

Can I upgrade just one member of my Team to premium to avail the premium benefits?

No, the tier benefits is at a workspace level, and not at user or plan levels. However, we can extend the trial for your workspace for a while, so that you can work and explore the benefits the premium tier has to offer.

How to get insights on the performance of plans assigned to teams?

From Dashboards > Add widget > Custom charts, choose Team as the data source to build visuals and get insights on the performance of your team. You can get insights on the health, progress, or count of objectives, measures, actions, or projects in regards to the relevant team and its team members.

Also, you can build the Teams table in Reports if you need to look at the performance of a team and its team members, and the initiatives they're part of.