Group people into teams

When you plan a project you rarely think "I need Sarah Chen for this stage"; you think "I need an architect's worth of capacity." A team lets you plan in exactly those terms: a named group of people you treat as one for assigning work, applying rates, and granting permissions.

We'll build the Architect team for Northlight Architects, put Priya Sharma in it, give it default rates, and use it to staff Riverside Apartments before the final cast is decided.

How Monument thinks about a team

Two ideas make teams worth using.

A team has shared capacity. A team's available hours are the sum of its members' available hours. So when you assign work to the Architect team, you're drawing down that shared total, not any one person's week. Book the team heavily and you can spend everyone's spare capacity at once, which is why a whole team lane can turn red on the schedule even when no individual looks maxed out. That's the team telling you the truth: you've planned more work than the group actually has hands for. You read and rebalance that in the resource swimlanes.

Plan with a team now, swap a person in later. Assign the Architect team to Concept Design today, while you still don't know who'll run it. The stage gets realistic hours, cost, and revenue immediately. When the team firms up, plan with the Architect role, then hand the work to a named person without redoing the numbers. The team is a placeholder with real capacity behind it.

Create the team

Start the team and decide how membership works.

1. 1

   Create a new team and name it Architect. Add a short description so colleagues know what it's for.

2. 2

   Leave Manual membership ticked to add people by hand.

3. 3

   Create the team.

Add members and set default rates

Open the team and fill it out. You can add existing staff or create a new person inline without leaving the panel.

1. 1

   In the team's Members section, click Add and search for Priya Sharma. Not on file yet? Create the staff member right from the search and they're added when saved.

2. 2

   Set the Default Billing Rate to Senior Architect Charge-out, two hundred dollars an hour, and the Default Cost Rate to Default Cost Rate, one hundred and fifty.

   
3. 3

   Click Save Changes to persist Architect with Priya Sharma and its two rate defaults.

Use the team on the schedule

The payoff is in planning. On Riverside Apartments, assign the Architect team to a stage instead of a named person. The stage draws on the team's shared capacity, and the team's lane on the schedule fills toward its combined line. Later, hand part of the work to Priya Sharma or another member, and the hours move from shared to named while the forecast holds.

Troubleshooting

• The team lane is red but every member looks fine. Capacity is shared. Several stages drawing on the same team add up against the combined total, so the team tips over before any one person does. Spread the work out or pull some onto named people with room; see balance capacity in the swimlanes.
• A member isn't picking up the team's rate. They have an override, or aren't set to inherit from this team. Open the person and switch them back to inheriting, or clear the override. Rates live in rates and rate history.
• There's a default team you didn't create. Organisations come with a default "Organization" team so rates and permissions have somewhere to live from day one. You can use it as-is or build your own alongside it.

Where this fits next

Your team can now stand in for real people while respecting how many hands you have. From here:

• Make the team's money right with rates and rate history.
• Keep its shared capacity honest as members take time off with leave and holidays.
• Plan and rebalance the team's load on the Gantt with balance capacity in the swimlanes.