Simplify communication and improve progress on every level by assigning an owner to each individual project and adding project updates complete with a color to represent the project health. It’s hard to keep track of multiple projects and make sure everyone stays in the loop. Too often, making sure the project team and the stakeholders are equally informed means you’re spending time writing lengthy emails or holding unnecessary meetings. Having one team member accountable for each project will make sure that a single point person is responsible for tracking the progress and reporting the status of the project. When someone has a question, they’ll know exactly who to contact, which gives the project more consistency and clarity. That’s why we’ve introduced Project Owner to Teamwork Projects. Project Owner allows you to assign a project to a specific team member, so they become the “owner” of that project. This person is responsible for keeping tabs on progress and providing updates. If there’s a bottleneck or priority that needs to be addressed, the project owner contacts the team members who are responsible, and everyone else can focus on their work. It also gives the team clarity on who to contact if they have a question.
Project Updates
As a project owner, you can also add an update to a project to let everyone know what the latest accomplishments or needs are. You can also choose to share updates with specific stakeholders. The project updates will then be added to the project summary, so your team can get up to speed with the latest developments at a glance. This also allows the project owner to provide consistent progress updates to senior management, stakeholders, and the wider team without having to create a special report.This is good news for users, too! You can request an update from the project owner on any projects you are part of, which can reduce unnecessary meetings and time spent answering basic questions.
Project updates support the use of Markdown and you can also use @mentioning to call out responsibilities of different team members and link to certain tasks or reference materials to give more context to your update. Project administrators can also add updates to a project even if they’re not the project owner. Note: You can choose whether or not you’d like your collaborators to be able to see project updates, simply go to your default settings to customize this.
Project Health
When adding a project update, you also have the option to choose a colour to represent the health of the project. There are 4 options: neutral, green, yellow, and red. This is a great way to show at a glance if the project is on track. The labels can also be customized based on your individual project needs.
How does this work with filters and reports?
The Project Owner feature is especially useful when used with Portfolio. You can filter project cards in the Portfolio view by project owner, which makes reporting much easier. Filters allow you to view specific workloads for each project manager, and you also have the option to filter by project health. Without leaving Portfolio view, you can also see all the previous project updates by clicking the quick view summary and also add a new one if needed. This allows team members to get context quickly when reviewing projects (for example, when you’re in a meeting), allowing them to be much more efficient and reducing the need to navigate to different views. Start using Project Owner and Project Updates now and let us know what you think! If you need a little more help getting started, you can check out our help doc.