Sites, Groups, Tags

Video - 2 minutes - Organizational settings, overview

Sites

This is the top level of organizational structure. Sites represent the locations your people work in.

Video - 1 minute - Organizational settings: Sites

From the Site, Operating knows how many hours per week all Site members work – unless there are individual exceptions. That’s where you also decide which Holiday calendar is used.

If you only have one office in one location, you’ll be fine with the default Site – make sure the working hours and holiday calendars are in place and you’re done.

Groups

Video - 1 minute - introduction to Groups

Operating allows you to replicate your organization structure to the extent that it matters. You don’t have to add all teams, hierarchies and reporting structures, but if you want to see the reports in that way, please do so.

An example: Groups as cross-border business units

Here you can see an example of a company called MattiCo Five that has been formed after a merger of multiple agencies that continue to work as separated business units (CreativeCo, Rebel Unit, Rogue Bunch, and Company XYZ with two units inside of it). Their people are located across Belgium and France. They also work with Externals, which they have put in a group outside of the MattiCo Five hierarchy.

This allows:

• reporting by unit or by country

• management of weekly working hours and holiday calendars for everyone in France

This is what it looks like for Joy, a consultant who can do two different roles: analyst and producer work, depending on the project. Their group memberships are visible here in their admin drawer: the France group, highlighted with the dark colour, is the primary group. That’s where they get their weekly working hours and holidays from.

Joy is working for the Comms group inside Company XYZ. That’s why they also have the membership in Company XYZ and MattiCo Five.

Joy’s work will show up in many different reports, depending on what is being filtered for.

Project and Client Tags

Video - 2 minutes - introduction to Tags

When you feel that the Groups aren’t granular enough for your reporting purposes, add Project and Client Tags.

For an IT consulting company, these might be nice project tag categories and example tags inside each category:

• project tag category: Project Type

  • Discovery

  • Implementation

  • Continuous Services

• project tag category: Service Offering

  • Design

  • Software Development

  • Strategy

You probably want to set the client tags to filter for specific industries and company characteristics, such as:

• client tag category: Industry

  • FMCG

  • Manufacturing

  • Energy

• client tag category: Location

  • EMEA

  • APAC

• client tag category: Size

  • Startup

  • SME

  • Enterprise

Filtering for groups, tags and roles

When you’ve added project groups, project or client tags, and roles in the project teams, the filtering panel will start showing up all possible combinations (that would give you any results). this crazy filtering example highlights that:

• Projects that match the following criteria:

  • Project Tag has either: Implementation or Software Development

  • Client Tag is EMEA

  • Site is UK

• …and you could still narrow it further down, but we can already see that only the ERP Implementation project for ABB is the only match.

We can’t wait to hear what kind of reporting solutions you build with these tools! Remember that you don’t want to over-complicate your fundamentally simple business. Add the metadata you will actually use, not more.