In the Teams tab of the Resource Pool, you can manage your teams easily and efficiently. This helps you maintain an overview at all times and quickly select the right teams for your projects.

• How Teams Help You
• Where to Find
  • Configuring Your View
• Adding Teams
  • Adding Manually
  • Adding by Import
• Editing Team Details
  • General
  • Details
  • Team Members
• Editing Team Allocations
  • How a Team's Available Capacity is Calculated
• Deleting a Team

How Teams Help You

Teams allow you to define a group of people that you can flexibly schedule for your projects. A team is treated like a single resource, so you don't have to assign individual people. This simplifies the planning process for resource managers, regardless of whether your organization works traditional, hybrid, or Agile. And when you move from high-level to detailed planning, you can use the Staff Role feature to find the right employee for your projects.

You can also assign velocity to teams so that their story points imported from an external tool via the Task or Jira Connector are automatically converted to person days in Meisterplan.

Find out more about how teams and roles interact in the article When to Use Teams vs Roles.

Where to Find

You need to have the Edit Resource Pool, Absences, OBS, Calendar and Skills right.

In the left sidebar, click Resource Pool and select the Teams tab:

In the list, you can see an overview of the teams with selected team details. Depending on the settings in the header, not all teams may be displayed in the list. If the selected portfolio includes a resource filter (for example, by OBS or primary role), the list will only display teams that are included in the filter. Learn more in the Portfolio Filters - Details article.

Click on a column header to sort its content alphanumerically (depending on the content type). Use the Search field to search all columns for a word or phrase.

Sorting of Numbers
Note that numbers will be sorted digit by digit. For example, when sorting by resource key in ascending order the team with the key "MPR-2" comes after the team with the key "MPR-19".

Configuring Your View

The resource view is only configured per user. If you reconfigure your columns, only you will see the changed configuration.

Filter Teams

To filter the team list for teams with certain values, click Filter:

You can select from the following fields:

• Top level OBS, e.g., Department
• Primary Role: displays all teams that have one of the selected primary roles
• Resource Manager: displays teams with the selected resource manager
• Team: displays all selected teams
• Team Status: depends on the team's start and finish dates which in turn are derived from the earliest start date and the latest finish date of the assigned team members.
  • Future: all resources have a start date after the current date
  • Inactive: all teams with an finish date before the current date; teams without assigned team members are automatically inactive as there is no start or finish date
  • Active: teams with a start date before today and a finish date after today
• Skills: displays only teams with all selected skills

You can use several filters at the same time to further limit the results. Learn more in the Ad-Hoc Filter article.

Configure Columns

To see only the team details that are relevant to you, you can customize the team list. Click Configure Columns to select the information you want to display in the order you prefer.

Find a list of all fields that you can select as columns below in the sections General and Details.

Adding Teams

You can add new teams in Meisterplan either manually or collectively by importing them via our REST API.

Adding Manually

In the team list, click Add Team and fill in the name. Check the Add more team details box to open the team details page:

Find an overview of all fields with explanations below in the sections General and Details.

Adding by Import

Use the REST API to add teams collectively. This option can also be automated.

No Impact on Licensing
Adding Teams does not affect your licensing package. 

Editing Team Details

You can edit a team in its details view. Select a team in the list and click the square icon at the end of the row.

General

• Name: Required field; To make a team easily recognizable in other views, we recommend adding the prefix “Team” in front of the team's name (e.g., “Team Frontend” instead of “Frontend”)
• Resource Key: Required field to uniquely identify a resource; value may only exist once in Meisterplan; when manually adding a team, a resource key is auto-generated which you can change at any time;
• Primary Role: Add a primary role (e.g., "Consultant Junior") for each team as the default to designate what role they commonly work in when allocated to projects. No matter the default role, you can allocate resources to projects in any role. Changing the primary role of a team does not change their project role in existing allocations.
• Resource Manager: Assign a resource manager for each team, e.g., the team or department lead. In the Team Planner, you can filter the displayed resources, teams, and roles by resource manager. To add a user as resource manager, you need to link the user to a resource first.
• Start and Finish: the earliest start and the latest finish date of the assigned team members; if there is no finish date for any team member, the finish remains empty.
• Status: depends on the start and finish dates:
  • Future: all resources with a start date after the current date
  • Inactive: all teams with a finish date before the current date; teams without assigned team members are automatically inactive as there is not a start or finish date; inactive teams cannot be allocated to projects
  • Active: all other teams with a start date before and a finish date after today

Details

• Cost per HourPro Premium: Basis for calculating allocation costs; the field always displays the current cost per hour; click the calendar icon at the end of the field to enter several costs per hour with different past or future Valid From dates; learn more in the article Importing Past Costs per Hour Retroactively. To calculate costs as best as possible, we recommend entering the average cost per hour of all assigned team members; if a team has no cost per hour, the cost per hour of the team's primary role is used for the allocation cost calculation. In the General section of your user group, you need to have the Access Financial Data right to access this field.
• Billing Rate per HourPro Premium: Basis for calculating allocation and total benefit. In the Project Details' section Roles and Resource - Billing Rates, you can apply the standard billing rates from the Resource Pool, entering the average billing rate of all assigned team members.
• OBS: Use the organizational breakdown structure to define, for example, the department and office of your team. Adding an OBS allows you to filter for the right teams in various views. Learn more in the Managing OBS article.
• Skills: Select the skills your team has. This allows you to filter for the right teams in various views. Learn more in the Managing Skills article.
• Story Points per Person DayPro Premium: Basis for calculating person days from story points for projects connected via the Jira or Task connector.

Please note: The OBS units or skills of a team apply to the entire team, regardless of which OBS units or skills the individual team members have.

Team Members

In the Team Members section, you can assign individual people to a team. This determines the capacity of the team and allows you to allocate the team to projects.

Assigning Team Members

In the toolbar, click Assign Team Members and select the desired resource. For each team member, enter the following details:

• Start Date (required)
• Finish Date (optional)
• Capacity (required): pre-filled with 100% but you can change this value at any time. The team capacity is the sum of the capacity of its team members. This also takes into account whether a team member works full-time or part-time, and whether there are any planned absences. For example: If a resource works 80% (36 hours per week) and is assigned to the team with 50% capacity, 18 hours per week are available for the team. If the resource is absent for a week, 0 hours are available for the team in this week.

You can assign a resource to multiple teams at once as the time periods of their team assignments do not overlap.

Learn more about capacity planning with teams in the article When to Use Teams vs Roles.

Editing Team Members

You can edit the capacity, the start date, and the finish date of a team member by clicking the respective row in the table:

To see more details about a team member, open the resource's detail view by clicking the square icon at the end of the row:

Hiding Former Team Members

To see only current and future team members, click Hide Former Team Members in the toolbar:

Removing Team Members

To delete a team member's assignment to the team, hover over the resource and click the trash can icon at the end of the row. To ensure the retroactive capacity remains correct, we recommend keeping team members on the team but adding a finish date.

Editing Team Allocations

When you click the tab Allocations in the details view of a team, you can see all of the projects to which the team is allocated, the respective allocation values and the available capacity. Below, you can see the resources that are assigned to the team within the specified date range. Click the arrow after the team name to expand the list of projects.

In the toolbar, you can select the allocation unit and the zoom level.

Hover over a section in the histogram to see the overall capacity, the allocations, and the remaining capacity for this time period.

To edit the allocations, the same options that you can find in the Team Planner's Time Grid Mode are available.

Adding a Project

To add a new project allocation for a resource or team, move your cursor over the resource or team and click the plus icon. Next, enter the project's name or project key into the search field and confirm with ENTER.

A new row will be added with the project's name and the allocation value 0. You can change this at any time.

Editing Allocation Values

To edit single allocation values in cells, click the cell and enter the new value. With our keyboard shortcuts, you can select and edit multiple cells at once, like with copying or overwriting cells.

Editing an Entire Allocation

Click the three dots next to the name of the project to open the context menu. There you will find the following actions:

• Replace Resource/Team: All values will be allocated to the desired resource or team, and the existing allocation will be deleted from the current resource or team. Learn more in the article Team Planner - Replacing Resource Allocations. You can replace the entire allocation, only the overallocation, or a percentage of the allocation.
• Unstaff to Role: The entire allocation will be transferred back to the role, and the existing allocation will be deleted from the current resource or team. Learn more in the article Team Planner - Replacing Resource Allocations.
• Change Project Role: The resource or team will remain allocated to the project, but in the newly selected role. 
• Remove from Project: The resource or team will be unassigned from this project.
• Open Project: Open the project's details.

Editing Part of an Allocation

Select one or more cells and click the three dots in the blue bubble above the selected cells. There you will find the following options:

• Add Remaining Capacity: The remaining available capacity of the resource or team will be added to the selected cells.
• Allocate in Percentage: The selected allocation cells will be filled with the specified percentage of the resource's or team's capacity. Existing values will be overwritten.
• Replace Resource/Team: All of the selected values will be allocated to the desired resource or team, and the existing allocation will be deleted from the current resource or team. You can replace the entire allocation, only the overallocation, or a percentage of the allocation.
  • Unstaff to Role: Once you select Replace Resource/Team, you will be able to unstaff the entire allocation back to the role, only the overallocation, or a percentage of the allocation. All of the selected values will be allocated to the role, and the existing allocation will be deleted from the current resource or team. Learn more in the article Team Planner - Replacing Resource Allocations.

How a Team's Available Capacity is Calculated

When hovering over the grid, you will see a hint with the available capacity of the team. This is calculated for each time period as follows:

For the selected time period of the zoom level (i.e. either week, month, quarter, or year), the team capacity of each team member is calculated from the available capacity and the percentage with which the resource is scheduled for the team. The sum of the capacities designated for the team of all team members is the average availability of the team for that time period.

Deleting a Team

To delete a team from the system, hover over the entry in the team list and click the trash can icon at the end of the row. You can also delete a team in its detail view.

Allocations are also deleted
When a team is deleted, all allocations of this team, both past and current, will also be deleted.

While you do have the option to delete a team, we recommend simply setting a finish date for its team members. Once the last finish date is in the past, the team will be set to inactive and can no longer be allocated to projects.

This enables you to keep all allocation data.