Manufacturing – R&D Projects

This Teamhood use case example is dedicated to those that have a need of managing several R&D projects at one time. Based on the best practices from our clients, this is a showcase of how to structure your workspace with a focus on on-time delivery, workload management, and collaboration.

After choosing the R&D project workspace template in Teamhood, you will notice that it is composed of several boards and one folder. The structure is as follows:

• Project Mars (board)
• Project Jupiter (board)
• Admin (folder – can contain multiple boards, pages, and other folders)
  • Administrative tasks (board)

Let’s take a look at them in more detail to better understand the process structure.

Project Mars/Jupiter

This template is geared towards managing several R&D projects at a time. As such, we suggest you use a separate board to manage each of these projects. Boards in Teamhood allow you to categorize and separate tasks, as well as filter reporting, thus having each project on a separate board, makes managing them much easier.

Now, let’s take a look at the composition of the first 2 boards. They are divided into rows and statuses.

Rows

Rows symbolise the project phases and statuses to symbolise the status of each individual task. You can add more rows depending on how many phases there are in your project and you can edit the statuses to delete or expand the ones provided in the template.

Statuses

The statuses here are divided into 4 main status groups:

1. Backlog – to hold all the new and planned items
   • To Do
   • Priority
2. Work In Progress – to represent which items are now being worked on
   • In Progress – This Status group is divided even further to allow for a visual representation of the child items
     • Child Item To Do
     • Child Item Doing
     • Child Item Done
3. QA – to symbolize the quality assurance step
   • Prototype
   • FMEA
4. Output – to hold all of the finished items
   • Completed

You may have already noticed that one status group of the board has child item statuses to visualize child items. What happens when you move an item with child items into this status is that the child items are expanded and visualized in the grey columns. Allowing you to track the status of each child item separatelly. Such a status column is especially useful for those working with a large number of child items.

Both of these boards are identical to start with, however, they are not intended to stay that way. You can easily modify the structure of each by clicking ‘Edit Board’ at the top right corner.

Administrative Tasks

The third board you will find in this template is dedicated to administrative tasks. As mentioned above, this board is placed into the Administrative folder, which is a nice way to separate boards and documents in different projects or departments.

Since the process for such tasks is much simpler and they may be common for all projects, it makes sense to hold them in a separate Administrative board. While this board is also composed out of rows and statuses, you will see that the structure is much simpler.

The rows are used to separate high and normal priority items. And the statuses define a simple process of – To Do, Doing, and Done. If you have a need for additional process steps or rows, you can add them by clicking ‘Edit Board’.

Tags

While the workspace structure is set up to separate each individual project, they may still be using the same resources, machinery or teams. To mark this on each item, you can use custom tags. Simply click on the tag sybol and then select the right one from the list or add a new one.

You will then be able to filter your boards, reports, and other views based on tags. For example, you would be able to see the availability of a certain machine in workload or analyze how much work hours were tracked by a specific team or for a specific client.

Timeline

Since all of the projects are visualized on individual boards, the Gantt chart will only show you the tasks and dependencies of one at a time. To see all of your items and their dependencies in one place, use the Timeline view. Here, you will see all of the boards available in your workspace. Furthermore, their rows are included to give you even more clarity.

If there are dependencies between items in two different boards, these will be visualized here for your convenience. You can filter the Timeline view, by users, tags, boards, dates, and more to see the data that interest you.

Workload Management

To oversee the workload of your team members across all projects, open the Workload view. The data in this view, is also pulled from all boards in the workspace, which makes it easy to understand just how busy your team is. If you are using tags to identify machinery, group the workload view by tag and you will see the utilization of it just as well.

In the workload view, you can set up custom available hours and hourly rates for all team members, and use the filters to adjust the amount of information that is shown.

Portfolio Overview

To quickly evaluate the state of each project, we suggest utilizing the Portfolio Overview. Here you will find the start and end dates for each project (Board) as well as the budget that was set. Depending on your team’s progress, Teamhood will calculate additional project data – Hour Limit, Estimation, Tracked Time, Budget, SPI, EV, and progress. All of this to give you a birdseye overview of what is going on with each project.

You can choose which fields to enable and which to hide.

Time Sheet Report

Lastly, this template also includes the Time Sheet view. Here, you can check and analyze the estimated vs the actual tracked time. Giving you you all of the tracking data as well as performance information owhich can be extremelly useful for setting estimations in the future.