Features

MetaTeam® gives you a full suite of team management and project governance tools that makes it simple to organize and manage your projects for high performance.

Each feature is based on project management standards and industry best practices.

Home Page

MetaTeam is organized around teams, projects, and groups. Each team member has a personal home page that helps them keep track of their work. The home page lists their teams, all their goals, roles, responsibilities and decisions, upcoming due dates and recent changes.

To keep things simple for new users MetaTeam shows you the minimum set of tabs that can display all your involvements. For example, when a new user logs in they typically won't see the Decisions tab because they will not yet have any decisions to take part in.

Team Workspace

Within a team, MetaTeam’s features are visually organized into three areas: planning and delivery, decision-making, and summary views. Information in each area is linked to the others in a network of related activities.

Teams form around goals, making that a natural place to start in MetaTeam. From there you can quickly get to any aspect of the teams work.

There is a set of vertical tabs at the top of the page that give information about when the team was created, who created it, a short description, an overall date range, contact information and other details.

As with the Home Page, MetaTeam shows you only the tabs that actually have information to display. This keeps the team as lightweight as you want it to be.

Team Charter

When you create a team charter the Charter tab is displayed and the Getting Started box shows all the types of information you can add to help flesh out the charter.

A charter may be declared official, or kept unofficial so that it is only visible to the owner. Once a charter is official it may be made visible across the organization or available to team members only.

The Charter tab can identify a specific timeframe the team is chartered for. It also highlights who is responsible for maintaining the charter. On the same line there are buttons for generating a printable management-ready charter report. This feature addresses one of the most commonly asked questions: what does a charter look like?

Chartering a project begins by defining its goals. MetaTeam manages all team goals, not just those specified by management as project objectives. MetaTeam lets you select from all chartered goals for inclusion in the formal charter.

MetaTeam guides the process of creating a charter by organizing the necessary information into separate tabs. The information collected includes scope, risks, authorization, etc. Each of these sections is structured as a set of discussions. You can add as much detail and edit as needed. As the comments are marked official they are added to the charter report.

As the charter is built you can browse both its overall structure and its discussions in tree views. The Charter Explorer includes all the roles, responsibilities and decisions that are represented in the charter report, along with the chartered goals.

The charter template included in MetaTeam follows standards and best practices. It is well suited for the majority of projects. However, PMO Edition customers have the option to work with eVisioner Professional Services to customize the charter report to meet their needs.

Goals

Goals management is central to planning a project and a core capability of MetaTeam. Whether you start from a charter or not mapping out team goals is the first step.

MetaTeam makes Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) creation easy. Your WBS is a hierarchy of goals that you can create and organize in list views or a drag and drop tree view. As you move from units of work in a WBS to a fleshed out project plan MetaTeam gives you the ability to fully describe and collaborate on each goal in a way scheduling-oriented tools do not do.

Goals are assigned to roles. MetaTeam makes assignment as simple as checking boxes in a grid. All the email traffic and documents that project managers typically use to assign goals is replaced by just a few seconds of work.

Optionally you may create specific tasks within any goal. Tasks are tightly defined units of work that cannot be broken down. Using tasks to plan the step-by-step implementation of a goal is a familiar approach, and it allows finer control of assignments.

When you assign tasks you can allocate the percentage each assignee will be accountable for. The assignees can log planned and completed activity against the task. Time-tracking gives you the most detailed visibility into planned activity, time spent, actual cost, how logged activity relates to variability between percent expected and percent complete, and other metrics.

MetaTeam goals can be aligned with decisions that are made as part of the project. Capturing those decisions in MetaTeam keeps everyone on the same page and helps you achieve better outcomes. Every decision entered into MetaTeam may be linked to one or more goals. The decision to goal linkage helps keep the focus on the objective, and helps the assigned roles track critical execution steps.

Keeping track of requirements and validating that objectives are met are common issues in goals management. MetaTeam lets you specify a goal’s criteria, allowing for each criterion to have a range of possible values. When you enter a criterion’s values you can set a threshold that identifies a pivotal success level.

Once you set criteria for success you can use those criteria in any decisions that are linked to your goal. MetaTeam gives team members the ability to prioritize the decision’s alternatives by setting the criteria values. The average of these settings determines the order of the alternatives, making it easy to rank alternatives in a systematic way (for example, in a vendor selection process.)

MetaTeam helps you give feedback to team members in a way that gives visibility into work that gets done towards goals. Commendations are particularly important in virtual teams where members often feel like their contributions are not recognized. At the same time, calling out issues early in an even-handed way can help teams correct course more productively. MetaTeam’s Citations tab lets you add a positive or negative indicator to recognize achievement towards a goal or request change. Citations can be seen in aggregate in the summary views.

Roles

Roles are a key organizing principle and lie at the heart of individual commitment to the team. MetaTeam uses roles as the meeting point for assignments of directed and self-directed work. One way to look at roles is as simple job descriptions, but MetaTeam roles go much further than that in using roles to organize information and connect people with their work.

Assigning roles to members is as simple and quick as checking boxes in a grid. Opening any role lets you allocate the percent of effort an individual is expected to take on.

MetaTeam makes it simple to assign goals to roles in a grid view on the Goals tab. You can also make assignments by opening any role and making the assignment there.

Similarly, assigning responsibilities is easy using the grid view in the Responsibilities tab. You can also assign responsibilities by opening a role and making the assignment there, and you can see the allocation of the roles time to each of its responsibilities.

Management and team leaders frequently track the number of full-time equivalents (FTE) needed for project delivery. FTE planning is best done at the level of roles, and MetaTeam makes it easy to plan at the role level and track in month to month reports and across projects.

Allocation and time reservations are two of the central problems with resource tracking in most schedule-oriented systems.

MetaTeam helps you quickly allocate the efforts of roles against responsibilities. This feature lets you understand at a glance who is involved and to what degree.

For example, in planning a tradeshow booth typically an event manager is responsible for technology but most of the work will be done by an IT person who can work relatively unsupervised on many aspects of delivery, freeing the manager to turn their attention elsewhere.

In a similar way, MetaTeam lets you allocate the effort of a role across a set of responsibilities. When you make these allocations you are blocking out reserved time that is unavailable for goals and tasks work. When a role is allocated to responsibilities in addition to directed work the role can quickly become overbooked. MetaTeam’s Resource Allocation and Heatmap reports highlight the problem for early resolution.

Responsibilities

MetaTeam presents responsibilities as units of self-directed work. Most scheduling tools do not handle responsibilities, but responsibilities are often significant commitments of time and attention. MetaTeam catalogs, assigns and allocates responsibilities so that they can contribute to strong resource management. Moreover, like goals and roles, responsibilities help organize information resources and deliverables.

MetaTeam lets you create a Responsibility Breakdown Structure that complements your WBS. This gives insight into the self-directed effort that is a part of goal and project delivery. You can break down responsibilities quickly with a drag-and-drop tree view. Insight into non-task related work helps identify if individuals and roles are being over-allocated early in the process when it’s easiest to correct.

You can map responsibilities to roles simply in MetaTeam’s grid view, or at a finer level of detail by opening individual responsibilities.

Unlike schedule-oriented tools, MetaTeam integrates responsibilities management in the project information structure and in reporting. It is critical to understand self-directed work in order to unlock talent. Project managers that don’t maintain visibility into that aspect of the project introduce a major risk. MetaTeam shows responsibilities in the Gantt and Calendar Views and in balanced progress and resource management reporting.

Decision-making

MetaTeam’s structured decision-making framework helps teams make better decisions more quickly, with less conflict and greater commitment to the results.

Decisions are structured in decision models. A decision model is a way to collect decisions according to:

Each decision model may contain as many decisions as needed. A decision model could represent the agenda for a meeting, a list of decisions to be made by management, a set of issues for the team members to vote on, or any number of other possibilities.

Decisions are powerful ways organize information. They may be simple or more complex depending on the needs. Each decision can have any number of alternatives, along with attached documents and discussions, as well as more decisions management-specific information.

MetaTeam decisions may be date-driven and can be marked with a percent complete. Types of dates available to be set include:

MetaTeam encourages teams to align decisions with the goals those decisions support. Linking decisions to goals is a best practice that recognizes the fact that decisions are always made in the context of a goal. Teams that use the goal linking feature help eliminate the confusion, distraction and controversy that often slows down decision-making and raises the cost of decisions.

Prioritization is an important part of managing decision-making. MetaTeam helps you rank decisions and the alternatives of decisions so that you can focus on the most important choices.

Decision ranking is driven by two optional settings. A simple rank comes from the decision creator assigning a level of importance. Simple ranking is intentionally minimalist and is completely optional.

MetaTeam offers Advanced Ranking as another prioritization option. Advanced Ranking orders decisions using a 16 point scale. The decision owner sets the Advanced Ranking value by answering four simple drop-down questions in a form that identify urgency, connectedness and other factors in a way that is easily understood and comparable across decisions.

Within a given decision, MetaTeam enables you to prioritize alternatives in two ways. First, if your decision is set up to allow team members to vote on the alternatives you see the team’s preferences, the strength of those preferences and team members’ comments on their votes. Voting can be configured to be on a secret ballot where only the tally is visible, or a vote can be fully public. Likewise voting can be setup to allow one vote per person or as many votes per-person as there are alternatives.

For more challenging decisions, the team can use goal criteria to rank alternatives. If a decision is supporting one or more goals that have requirements, those criteria are presented in the decision. Members can review the options and set the value of the criteria according to their interpretation of the facts. MetaTeam uses the average of those values to order the options so that you can quickly see the input of the members. Reporting shows you the details of how individual members set the criteria in a grid layout that facilitates a structured discussion of the merits.

MetaTeam enables a consistent approach to facts, requirements and resolutions. Each of these categories of information is separated and structured in dialog threads. As with all MetaTeam discussions, members’ comments can be marked public or private and official or unofficial so that you can better focus discussion and recognize agreements.

MetaTeam allows multiple resolutions per decision. When a decision has been conclusively resolved the decision owner marks the decision status “Resolved” to freeze the decision for implementation.

Team Communications

MetaTeam connects the dots to make your team’s information more findable, more understandable, and more shareable.

Every team has its own information space with collaborative features that make delivering work much more coherent. Since the organizing framework is based on planning activities, content is where you expect to find it. Features for deliverables creation, management and communication are found in every part of MetaTeam and include: