How to Organize Functional Teams Based on Employee Skills?

March 1, 2022

Learn how to build functional teams in Jira based on employees' skills and roles. Report on cross-functional teams in Jira with ActivityTimeline.

While a project team contains all sorts of users who are connected with the specific projects, the functional team consists of experts in a specific field. ActivityTimeline provides a possibility to create a group of experts (functional team) that is formed automatically based on either its position or skillset. This way suits matrix organizations where specialists always change due to the resource needs of the current projects.

For example, the Manager of B Project, PM Kate, needs 2 developers for his project. The main challenge is to find the right resources to complete tasks in time, that’s why PM Kate asks the head of the development team, Frank, to find the right people.

Frank opens ActivityTimeline, creates a new functional team based on position or skill ( if Kate needs a user who is advanced in the specific programming language). After that, all of the suitable developers are brought into one functional team, their workload is visible on the main dashboard, Frank sees who is doing what and when so he can decide who is available for Kate’s project.

Cross-functional team

In order to create such a team, you firstly need to associate your users with certain skills or positions. When you have your Positions and Skills assigned to users, you can try to set up a functional team based on one of these criteria. For this go to:

  1. Configuration → Teams
  2. Create a new team → Functional team
  3. Choose skill/position you want to form a team based on
  4. After you click ‘Create’ system will search for every user that has this skill/position and add them to this new team:

If the development lead Frank wants to find resources for the long-term projects he can create the functional team and use a Resource Workload Report which allows observing the users’ workload more comprehensively. As we can see from the report, Mike is not as loaded as his colleagues, so Frank can assign him to other projects.

functional team report
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