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Setting up Team Roles

Team Roles is the answer to "who owns firmware on this project?" — a question about a responsibility, which spans many tasks and outlives all of them. Assignees tell you who is doing one task; Team Roles tell you who owns an area.

Open it from Team Roles in the sidebar, under Timeline. Every member of the project can see it. Only project admins can change it.

Team Roles are a description, not a permission

This is worth being clear about, because the word "role" does double duty in TaskTree.

  • Team Roles — what you set up on this page. Firmware, Mechanical Design, Project Lead. They describe how the work is divided up. They do not change what anyone can do in TaskTree.
  • Editor and admin — set in Project settings. These control who can edit tasks and who can manage the project.

Making someone Project Lead on this page does not make them a project admin, and taking them out of a Team Role does not remove their access. The two are set in two different places, on purpose.

What the page shows

A chart of the responsibilities on this project, read top to bottom: a role at the top, the areas beneath it, and — if you need them — sub-areas beneath those. Three levels deep is the limit.

Each box carries the role's name, an optional description of what it covers, and the people in it. A role can hold any number of people, including none — an empty one reads Vacant, which is a genuinely useful thing to be able to say while you are still working out who does what.

One person can hold several roles. At a team of ten, most people do.

Start from the suggested set

A project with no Team Roles yet offers admins Add suggested roles. It sets up:

  • Project Lead, with
  • Firmware, Electrical Design and Mechanical Design beneath it.

That is a starting point, not a template you have to keep — rename them, delete the ones that don't apply, add the ones that do. Every project's breakdown is its own.

If you'd rather start from nothing, Add top-level role sits beside it and creates a single empty role for you to build out.

Add, edit and fill a role (admins)

  1. Click Edit on the Team Roles page.
  2. Add a role with the + on the role you want it to sit beneath, or Add top-level role for a new root.
  3. Click a role — or the ✎ on it — to open its editor, which has four fields: Name, Description, People, and Sits under (which role it belongs beneath).
  4. Choose people under People — it offers the project's members. Someone who isn't a member of the project can't be put in a role; add them in Project settings first.
  5. Click Save. Nothing is written until you do. When you've finished, click Done to leave edit mode.

Rearrange the chart by dragging (admins)

In edit mode, drag a role box to move it:

  • Drop it on another role to move it underneath that one.
  • Drop it in the gap between two roles to reorder it among them.
  • Drop it on the "Top level" strip — which appears while you're dragging — to pull it out to the top of the chart.

A role's sub-roles come with it. Drops that aren't allowed — onto its own sub-role, or somewhere that would make the chart more than three levels deep — dim as you drag over them, so you can see the refusal before you let go.

If you'd rather not drag — or you're working from the keyboard — the Sits under field in a role's editor does the same job from a list, and greys out the choices that aren't allowed with the reason why.

Deleting a role

Deleting a role also deletes everything beneath it. TaskTree asks first and tells you how many roles will go.

Deleting a role never removes anyone from the project or unassigns any task — it only removes the description of the responsibility.

When somebody leaves the project

Remove someone from the project in Project settings and they come out of every Team Role they held on it. If that leaves a role empty, it reads Vacant and is waiting for you to fill it. Project settings warns you which roles are about to be vacated before you remove them.

Who changed this?

Each role records who created it and who last changed it. Team Roles are not part of the task history, so Ctrl+Z does not undo a change here — and, unlike a task, changing a role does not appear in the project's activity. If someone else has the page open while you edit, they'll see your change when they next come back to the tab.