Connect your Team Workspaces with Automated Workflows
At ZenHub, we envision a future where no one has to "do" project management. A solution where projects manage themselves based on the work performed and completed. We aim to bridge the communication gap between development teams and the rest of your organization without any additional effort. Plain and simple, that's our mission.
With Automated Workflows, each team can continue work through their own unique workflow while communicating their progress to a collective Workspace or in some case's several team Workspaces.
When setting up your Workspaces in ZenHub we encourage all teams big and small to think about the hand-off's, stakeholders and collaborators within their ecosystem and leverage Workflows to surface the big picture. The first step is to think about your teams use case and the types of hand-offs, or transitions that typically take place.
An example...
Since there are different kinds of teams, we start by thinking about the preferred workflow for each team and how they managing work. In ZenHub you can create a Team Workspace that is unique to your workflow and team needs.
If you are a team of teams, you will likely have a Front End team, a Back End team, a QA team, a Product team, and perhaps a Design team, working together. Helping keep everything aligned is a Project Manager or Scrum Master who's role is to support everyone to hit their goals and ensure projects get delivered as expected to stakeholders.
At ZenHub when we talk about Team Workspaces we are referring to your Board, Repositories, Reporting and Roadmap that are unique to your team
Step 1: Determine your Team Workspace set up - We can start by thinking about each teams preferred workflow for managing the work assigned to them (ie. the pipelines they want to use to reflect the status of the work). It's common that each team may have a different set of pipelines to track their work. To avoid creating a large board that accommodates 4-5 teams individual workflows, as a team the choice is made to separate each teams workflow into its own individual Workspace/Board.
Check out How Workspaces can be used by your team for more information on this.
Step 2 - to this process is to determine the GitHub repositories that each team will need to connect to their Workspace in order to get to work. A repository can be shared between multiple Workspaces so this is key to ensuring that each team has visibility into the work that they will be collaborating on together.
Check out Creating multi-repo boards for more details on best practices
Step 3: Eliminate manual handoffs between teams by setting up Workflows - Now that you've set up each team's Workspace and connected the relevant repositories, the next step is to make sure that everyone stays in sync and up to date. That is where Automated Workflows comes into play.
Throughout the life cycle of a GitHub issue, there are typically a number of handoffs that occur between teams, such as moving from Product to Design and Design to Engineering. Each handoff represents an opportunity for delay if the status of an issue is not properly communicated.
Now that each team has their Workspace, you can now use Workflows to connect the dots and ensure that shared work moves across all the Workspaces that it is a part of and doesn't fall through the cracks.
Check out Getting started with Workflows in ZenHub for best practices
For example: to ensure there is an automated handoff between the Product team and the Design team, you can start by setting up automation between the Product Teams "Ready for Design" pipeline and the Design Teams "Backlog" as seen in the graphic below
We've also created a short demo video here for additional use cases and examples.
Step 4 - Use Workflows to Surface the Big Picture - Now that the team is set up with their Workspaces, and automation is in place, the team is hard at work. As work starts to move across the Team Workspaces and towards completion Project Managers and Scrum Masters are going to be interested in understanding, at a glance, what the status of each project is at any given time.
To set up this process you can start by creating a "Management View" Workspace with all repositories from each Team Workspace connected to it. Once everything is connected the next step is to customize your pipelines to create that "Big Picture".
For Example - in the Management View Workspace below, we've created a Backlog, In Progress, In Review, and a Closed pipeline.
Once the Project Manager or Scrum Master has set up their Management View Workspace and customized their pipelines, the final step us to connect the individual teams pipelines to roll up the status of each project as it moves towards completion. Please see our demo video here for a hands on example of how this can be set up or Getting started with Workflows in ZenHub for best practices.