Is Teamwork any good for localization project managers?
Welcome to another episode in this series, where every month we’ll check out a new project management platform and see how viable it is for localization. All online software will be either free or with a free trial, so you can try it on your own.
In this video, I’ll show you how to use Teamwork to schedule your localization projects. Together, we’ll plan two simple projects and create one dashboard.
Andrej Zito
Hi there, this is Andrej from Localization Academy. In this video, I’m going to give you a small short tutorial for Teamwork. And I’m going to show you how to go from this to this. And also, as we go and explain to you how I created these two projects, I’m going to give you my commentary on what I think is great about Teamwork, and also what I think could be improved, especially compared to the other platforms that tried before as part of the series. So, let’s get right into the tutorial. And this is how you start with Teamwork. So, after the initial first few information you enter about yourself and your company s in many other platforms, part of your first login experience, you have this simple way like this wizard, where you create your first project. So this is where we’re going to start entering our first project. And we always start with Project A, which is a very simple project of only three tasks. And those tasks are translation, we usually indicate the word count, we say review, which is 40 hours, and then we do delivery continue. What works better for you, you can change later, we always start with a table. Because we want to define the columns and the properties that we track for each task. Invite your teammates quickly going to at my to bake people. I am Christian, and we will use them as translators for Japanese and German continue. And this is it, we’ll come to in a short layouts of Teamwork. First thing that we’re going to do, we’re going to add the subtasks. He was a little bit surprised that the way how you add subtasks is not so easy, you can always open this thing and add sub tasks through here. But if I wanted to add multiple subtasks with keyboard, I cannot do it from this view. I’m not sure if I can do it from here, I’m I’m going to say no. But I found this way here you have the more options for this show. And here you have they actually created a specific popup window to quickly add subtasks. And that’s what we’re going to do. So we’re going to for translation, we’re going to say that we are going to be tracking the German translation may use enter Japanese translation, French translation, oops, and orange translation. Okay, this is a very easy way how to do that. Here is the first thing in other platforms, if you have seen my previous tutorials, adding subtasks was pretty easy and simple. And you could do it directly from the let’s say the table view, you didn’t have to go into any specific windows or popups. And you could also I could also add, let’s say a new line, a new sub task just with my keyboard, I cannot do that in Teamwork. And that is not the only thing. So we’re going to add these four tasks. And we’re going to sign them to anyone. Okay, there we have it. Not a thing, which I found quite surprising is that you cannot reorder the subtasks. I can reorder the main tasks. And a tree by the way, it looks very nice. But for some reason, I don’t know why. And I don’t know how to do that. But even if you go here, excuse me, if even if you go here to translation, you can see that there’s no way there’s no dragging here how to drag it below. So that to me is quite surprising. So next thing we’re going to do, we’re going to do the same thing for view. Now we have the all the tasks and subtasks. For our simple project. A next thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to clean up the columns that we need because bunch of the stuff we don’t need. The way you do that is you click this plus sign here, which initially by default, I would say it means like adding something. But you can also use it to remove columns. So to me, it’s like if you’re editing something, it would be better to maybe use three dots or something like that, but whatever. So what do we need to keep here we don’t need priority. We don’t need anything about the time. We don’t need to tax but what we want is start date due date assignee. And the way that statuses are handled in Teamwork is that you have this little sort of check boxes. So technically the only statuses that you have are
Andrej Zito
like incomplete and complete. And then you can group them into these task lists. But for the status that we normally typically see in other platforms that you would use, I don’t know, on canon board, or something like that, we’re going to actually have to define the Status column ourselves. Because as you can see here, these are the default fields. And we don’t have anything like that. So that’s next think. So add custom fields, I’m going to call it status. And this is where you can set if it’s project specific. So ideally, we want to set this status on a global level. So I’m going to uncheck this. And here’s the type. And it’s going to be a drop down. And here, I’m going to punch in all the different statuses that we normally use. And I’m going to use the little hack that I use. So for subtasks, I’m going to prefix them with this arrow emoji. And you’ll see that in a while. This one, this one, okay, these are all those statuses that we want to be tracking and for done, we are just going to take off the task when we need to. Okay, save the custom field. And it’s our edit here. And I’m just going to quickly reorder it. So I think my status should be first started a due date and maybe assignee, we can leave it to the last part. Next thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to actually fill out the baits. So this is our schedule, very simple. Next thing I’m going to do is I’m going to set the status. Alright, so these are statuses. Really cute, although maybe I would imagine seeing this a little bit bigger font. Now, the final thing, is that just the assignee last time when I was trying it, I had some issues. Yes, exactly this thing, I don’t know why this happens. Going to turn this off. I don’t know why this happens. It’s just loading something and then I cannot do anything. So what can I do, I don’t know what to do about it. If by chance you don’t you know what went wrong, and how to fix this. I don’t know why the window is not loading. So let me know. Now when it comes to the whole layout. Another things that we can do here is here, you can filter out only the tasks that are assigned to you. So then we look like this, I think that’s pretty, pretty handy. Let me expand this. Here you have, again, we’ve seen this in other platforms, you can only focus on the tasks that are still incomplete. Or you can show all tasks. Now everything is incomplete. So it shows already, but I typically like to keep everything as all tasks. And one more thing that I have to point out, which is to me very disappointing, is that in pretty much all of the other platforms, if you are using a table view, you can pretty much move around the table a lot with your keyboard, and you can do the basic Ctrl C Ctrl V copy paste operations. But in this case, it’s just not possible, or I don’t know how to do it. So first of all, I cannot even select anything with my keyboard. Like if I press down up, it only moves my whole page, the the scroll bar, it doesn’t actually select any values, I cannot right click doesn’t give you any context menu, nothing like that. So it’s a little bit disappointing because you have to uncheck the numbers manually using mouse selecting every field. So to me that is very, very, very, very disappointing. And if that’s not it, what I’m going to show you next is the Gantt chart, like I mentioned in other previous videos, Gantt chart to me is the best way how you can get a nice visual view of where you are today. What can you do tomorrow and so on. But this is another disappointing thing is that this is how it looks like in Teamwork. To me, this really says that this is like a legacy feature and it hasn’t been even updated to the new look. I think when I was doing initially my let’s say research or trying out Teamwork for the first time, I think I found in some videos that may be Teamwork used to look something like this. But as you can see the the buttons, everything here the colors, the color palette, everything looks different, even the the normal menu that you normally see in other apps, right like in other apps, if we if we switch to Gantt view, like the main menu, the navigation would still be there. It would just maybe, I don’t know.
Andrej Zito
View the Gantt chart within this area. But no, in case of Teamwork, it looks like I went to some completely different app that first of all looks very, very ugly, very old fashioned. And there’s very little customization that you can do. Good thing is that it shows the weekend, you can still expand and collapse the tasks, which is nice thing that I don’t like is that all of the things that you decide to show for the tasks are either put on the left side on the right side or the right side, there’s no way to put it inside. And, yeah, the good thing is that you still have this, you know, this, I don’t know, this suits grouping thing, or whatever that is. Anyway, I’ll delete this from the menu from the recording. So yeah. So this is the Gantt chart. And there’s nothing more than I can show you here, you can zoom in, you can zoom out, that’s pretty nice, you can move around with the Gantt chart. And that’s about it. That’s about it. So I guess Functionality wise, it does what it’s supposed to do, you can still move it, move around with it and adjust the tasks here. But it’s just the whole visual presentation of this. Now, what I’m going to do next is I’m going to create project B. And for that one, we usually like to duplicate Project A, the way you do that here is that you just click on this dots for Project A. And we’re going to say we want to copy, choose a name for the project that will be project B, choose what to carry over here, you can also do a date offset, which I think is a pretty neat feature. And I just put zero, so to keep the date the same. And we could pretty much everything. And just to save. Now, the first thing that you see here right now is that even the copy functionality is not very far out, because as you can see, my layout is completely different. So that is another thing that could be improved. And that is to also include copying the layout, the way I define my columns for each task. So first thing that I’m going to do is I’m just going to clean it up again. So for Project B, what we normally do is we create three groups of tasks based on the different language scopes. So we right now have everything under to do which I could have actually renamed to, let’s say all for Project A, but I’m going to leave it as is. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to add a task list. So I’m going to say we’re going to have one for language independence. And then we want the one for branch Korean. And this one, I’m just going to rename and this will become our German, Japanese. Okay, I was trying for a little while to find out so that I don’t give you bad information, how to reorder the task lists because there’s no option to drag and move it and I just didn’t find it. So I guess we’re going to have to edit it in a way that I have my language independent first. And then I’m going to have my German Japanese second, which means I’m going to move some of the tasks I believe I can move them yes. Okay, so this works nicely. So let me move everything here. coding the review. Okay, good. Now, this is where I’m going to fast forward and I’m going to fill out all the tasks that we have for Project B because I’m just basically going to be doing the same thing that I did for Project eight. So see you in a while. Alright, we’re back. I loaded everything up there. I changed the baits I set the status. So here we have the German Japanese group, which does transition review and then they do two rounds of ATP in QA, then delivery and we have French Korean which just does NTP and then the ADP QA and delivery. Now, the funny thing which again I have learned only just now is that I also set up the third task list, which serves as a container for the language independent task which we do at first and there I loaded pre processing
Andrej Zito
and You cannot see it right now, even though here my filter for tasks is set to All tasks. So if I add test, it’s going to bring up back the whole task list back to the view. So you can see it here. And here you can see the task that I had there before. Reversal sync for 10 hours, which is completed. And again, this is another thing that I just noticed is that it’s funny that even if you set it as completed, it still highlights the due date as ret, even though it’s completed. So it’s technically not overdue, right if it was completed. So we have very similar situation in some other platform. But there when you set it to done, this didn’t highlight s, right. But what I absolutely don’t understand, I don’t know how to set it if I’m doing something wrong. But if my filter is to show all the tasks, if I delete the one like I hadn’t before, I would still like it to show language independent task list with that one, as like completed, but instead, it just removes everything. So I guess if all the tasks from a task list are completed, it just removes the whole task list. And I don’t know how to set up the task list to I don’t know be showed to be shown even if all the tasks are completed. But anyway, that’s just another thing, which to me is different in the worst way than we had with the other platforms. So now that we have this project set up, just quickly, let’s have a look at the Gantt chart, which still doesn’t look any prettier. It’s still pretty ugly. So we have our translation review. And blah, blah, blah, here we have their remaining tasks mtpe. There it is. So it’s functional, you can see the things that you want to see, but it just needs a little bit of facelift to match the style of, let’s say the main area of Teamwork. That means we have now project A and project B setup. Now the final thing that I always do in the series is I try to create some sort of a unified one central, sort of a dashboard view. But although we’re just using another Gantt chart, where we ideally want to see all the projects in our portfolio that we’re managing, so that we can see what we have to do today. And this is where again, I’m going to have to ask you if you know how to do this in Teamwork, because I looked under everything that is available here in Teamwork. And I just didn’t find a way how to put it together in a way that you could actually drill down to the lower levels. So what I tried is that I tried to create another project, which maybe would work as a container, but I cannot somehow let’s say import or duplicate or reference project A and project B inside of it. So that doesn’t work. When it comes to my work, this could technically work if I marked all the tasks for me. But in any case, this is just a table that just lists things. And there’s no way how you can display your tasks on a Gantt view, maybe reason why they don’t want you to see it. And they can view is because that they can view is just that pretty. Then the other option that you have here is to do go to this everything, which to me is just like an aggregate of all the things. But here we have some milestones, risks, links, notebooks, but there’s nothing like what I’m looking for. We have some reports here. But the reports are mostly high level things. So here you can see project a project B, which is what we want to see. But it’s only aggregated based on the task that you completed. But you can drill down into it. utilization and plan versus actuals is mostly related to say how much the people are working, and the time that we plan versus actuals. So it doesn’t show you the schedule for all your projects.
Andrej Zito
So, in other words, reports, final thing, which I think brings me closest to what I wanted to do is actually and here under schedule. On the planning, you can see our two projects, but when you expand it, it’s only shows the utilization of the people. And then we have some overview, nothing their portfolio. And the last thing that I thought was going to be what I wanted it was the chart thing. And as you can see here, it has no projects to show because there are no projects with dates set. I spent some time trying to figure out where exactly you said this, and now I can show you so if you go to your project and You go to the dashboard of your project, and you click this navigation menu, you’re going to see here, you can set the start and end dates. And the good thing here is that it sets the dates automatically based on your tasks. So I’m just going to confirm it. And the dates are set. And I’m going to do the same thing for Project B. So dashboards, set start and end date sets. Now when we go back to planning chart, here, you can see that our projects are actually what’s on the calendar, which to me is nice. But the problem is that you cannot drill down. Okay, you only see really the high level of when the project starts and ends. But if you want a more granular view, you have to we have to actually go inside each project, and then look at each Gantt chart. So if you’re managing, I don’t know, five smaller projects or 10. At the same time, yes, you can see the the bigger timeline for the projects. But if you want to see what actually is happening on today, then you don’t have that information here. And that is another thing for me, which is a little bit of a problem, or Teamwork. So yeah, I mentioned other issues throughout this tutorial. Hopefully, it was still useful to you. When I first launched the work, I really liked the whole UI. I think the branding and everything is super good. But there are a couple of things when it comes to the user experience, the way how you can interact with the data, how you insert the data. And of course, the Gantt chart and the fact that you cannot have one unify, let’s say again view of all your projects. That to me is a big, big, big issue. And if I had to pick, definitely based on my previous experience, there are definitely way better platforms out there. If you’re looking to do something that’s that I’m doing. Okay, that’s it for this tutorial. Thank you for watching, and stay tuned for another platform that I’m going to try in probably one month. until then see you bye bye.
