At my current company, we use Teamwork for our project management tool for most of our customers. Though my preferred tool is JIRA, I’ve found a way to use Teamwork in such a way that I can effectively manage my projects how I like to.

My 4 must-haves when running a development team are:

1. Either weekly or bi-weekly iterations (sprints)
2. Sprint assignments + estimates aligning with weekly resourcing
3. Feature groupings, or “epics”
4. Moving tickets through a customized feature development workflow

1. Either weekly or bi-weekly iterations (sprints)

When asking around to different project managers, I found that some people were managing this in different ways on Teamwork. These ways included:

• Task list
• Board columns
• Labels
• Priority markers
• Subtasks on a sprint task

My preferred method is to use Task lists.

Using task lists, I can plan my sprints in advance, and drag tasks between sprints as things change on my project. (Note: you cannot apply a filter and drag tasks between task lists, but you can use the downward arrow and click “move” to move an item between task lists.)\

2. Sprint assignments + estimates aligning with weekly resourcing

Also using task lists, I can identify weeks out how many hours each of my team members have by sprint. My sprints are 2 weeks, so for a short project like this one, I was able to assign all my work to an iteration based on how many hours I had each team member resourced.

Then, I can check how many hours each person is assigned work by using saved filters.

This does get a little finicky as sprint assignments change, but it does the job.

3. Feature groupings, or “epics”

This one took a bit of time to get used to, since epics are something I use religiously on JIRA. The two best solutions for this are:

• Labels
• Including the epic in the title and using saved filters

This does work ok, and I don’t find myself using epics as much since it just extends the title, but it works well enough when you are doing a build so you don’t lose track of different elements. Also, when you filter by that epic name, you can add up remaining hours so you can establish % complete.

4. Moving tickets through a customized feature development workflow

This is where the Teamwork boards shine. On JIRA you can force a workflow (i.e. a person can’t move a task from “in progress” to “ready to deploy” without moving it through code review + QA first), where as on Teamwork you can’t, but our teams here are used to following the columns left to right so this hasn’t presented any issues.

My preferred workflow is as follows:

I’d love to hear about your solutions. How do you use Teamwork or other Project Management tools?