03For teams
Four responsibilities, one workspace
Who owns each action, review, and hand-off?
A person holds the roles they have been granted, all at once. There is no role switcher, and holding a role is not the same as being appointed to a particular department — a department manager without an appointment manages no department.
Responsibility profiles
What each role is for, in the product's own words.
Project manager
Owns the requirement, not the people.
Defines technologies and team roles, runs Team Finder and asks for the hours a project needs.
Department manager
Owns the people.
Reviews every request against real capacity — allocated now, available now, and what acceptance would make it.
Organization admin
Owns the structure.
Creates departments and team roles, invites people to the workspace and decides which roles each person holds.
Employee
Owns their own record.
Declares skills, levels and experience, and sees the projects they are on and have been on.
Decisions and hand-offs
What each role may actually do, checked against what the system allows rather than what the role is called.
| Responsibility | Create departments and team roles | Decide who is in the workspace | Maintain the skill catalogue | Declare their own skills | Define project requirements | Run Team Finder and propose | Accept or reject a proposal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organization admin | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | No | No | No |
| Department manager | No | No | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Project manager | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Employee | No | No | No | Yes | No | No | No |
One request, three desks
One request as it passes between them.
Organization admin
Creates the departments and team roles the rest of the model refers to.
Employee
Declares the skills that make them findable, at a level and an experience.
Project manager
Writes the requirement, runs Team Finder, and proposes a person for specific hours.
Department manager
Weighs the request against that person's real capacity and accepts or rejects it.
Only the last of those four changes who is on a team, and it is recorded either way.
What each role does not own
Each of these is a refusal the system enforces, not a convention.
- Organization admin
- Cannot create a project, run Team Finder, administer the skill catalogue, or review staffing. Structure is not the same authority as the work done inside it.
- Department manager
- Without an appointment to a department, holds the role but manages no department — the catalogue is open to them, the department link is not.
- Project manager
- Manages the projects they own, not every project. A project belonging to someone else is not visible to them at all.
- Employee
- Owns their own record. Nobody else edits their skills, and they place nobody on a project.