How do different organizations use TeamHeadquarters?

TeamHeadquarters can be used in many different ways.  How it's used depends on your corporate culture, your type of business, and your current needs.  Below is a contrast between the two extremes: the Classic deployment and the One Task List deployment.  Note that one organization could support different models for different departments at the same time.

The "Classic" deployment

The "classic" approach to deploying TeamHeadquarters treats the project management and help desk tools as functionally separate.

The approach revolves around a formally defined project portfolio.  Projects are reviewed on a regular basis (via Portfolio Reports) by a Project Management Office (PMO) and/or executive committee.  Projects require work breakdown structures with tasks that are no more than 4 hours long, and project managers are expected to ensure (via Resource Allocation Reports) that their project schedules do not depend on unrealistic work schedules.  The project managers are largely allocated to maintaining their project plans.

Internal and external technical support is provided by a formal Help Desk, using TeamHeadquarters ticket queues.  Second and third line support is provided by non-Help Desk staff by re-assigning tickets as needed.

Management relies equally on reporting and functionality from both the project management and help desk tool sets.  

The "One Task List" deployment

The One Task List approach leverages the intimate integration of projects and queues.  Projects contain ticket queues, and the tickets themselves can be 'related' to tasks.  

This approach makes organizations easier to manage, especially if they are faced with frequent priority shifts and crisis situations.  In this scenario, the primary focus is on managing today's work for everyone in the organization.  

The portfolio of projects is a comprehensive collection of budgets, plans, and high level allocations for the entire organization, including project teams, service desks, administrative staff, specialists, management committees, auditors, etc.  With UTM, everybody's work is pre-planned to some extent, in the same fashion, with the same tools.  TeamHeadquarters tasks are used to represent the plan/estimate , with actual hours charged directly against the task using time sheets.  To that extent, this scenario is typical of project management software.

The difference comes in how tickets are used.  With One Task List, tickets become a universal unit of work.  They can be related to tasks, so that the activities logged by a ticket are reported as the 'actuals' for a task.  Time sheets can 'auto-populate' from the raw ticket data.  So, to the extent that tickets are used for executing the work, time sheet entries are automatically entered.

One Task List leverages a simple principle: all work should be managed the same way, with the same tool.  The "plan - work - manage" cycle is consistently applied, assuming that tickets are used to assign all work.

The difference at a glance