Inserting Common Team Workflows
In the Work Breakdown Structure Editor, you can quickly add the
contents of a process/workflow that you previously defined in the
Common Team Workflows Editor. Simply select a target WBS item, and
then select the desired workflow from the Workflow menu. The contents
of the selected workflow will be added as children of the selected
target WBS item. For example, suppose you have the following defined
process:

and the following WBS:

If you were to highlight Component B and choose Simple Process
from the Workflow menu, it would produce the following WBS:

You can also insert a workflow by highlighting a component and typing
Ctrl-W (or Command-W on Mac OS X). If you make a mistake (for example,
inserting the workflow under the wrong WBS item), you can always undo it using
the undo button (
).
Rectangular icons
(
) are used to indicate tasks that
were created by the application of a workflow. It is important to note that
these items inserted into your WBS via this method are copies of the
items in the defined process or workflow. As a result, you can freely edit the
inserted items without affecting the official process/workflow definition. For
example:
- You might apply a team workflow to a component, and later decide that a
few of the workflow steps are not applicable for the component in
question. You can safely delete the unneeded tasks from underneath the
component. In this scenario, the time from the deleted tasks will be
reallocated to the other tasks in the workflow based on their relative
percentage weights, allowing the component's overall time estimate to
remain the same.
- On a larger component, some workflow tasks might end up being large. You
can subdivide steps to capture your iterative plan for how the work will
be done, and to get earned value credit for the subparts as they are
completed.
This also means, however, that if you use the Common Team Workflows Editor
to alter the definition of a process/workflow later, those changes will not
automatically be propagated into the team's WBS. For example, if you were to
open the Common Team Workflows Editor and delete the Planning step from the
definition of the "Simple Process" workflow shown above, that change would not
automatically affect the list of tasks under Component B. It would continue
to include a Planning step.
If you make a change to a workflow and you would like that change to
propagate into the WBS, use the "Reapply Workflow" option on the workflow
menu. This option can be used in several ways:
- If you highlight an existing task that was created from a workflow,
choosing the Reapply option will let you update the workflow-related tasks for
the enclosing component.
- If you choose a component or higher branch of the WBS, you can update all
of the workflow-related tasks for that branch of the hierarchy.
- If desired, you can search the entire WBS for workflow-related tasks, and
update them to match the current workflow definitions.
Reapplying a workflow will make the following changes:
- Insert new workflow steps in the right order
- Update the names and types of workflow steps that have changed
- Rearrange workflow steps if necessary
- Delete WBS tasks for workflow steps that have been deleted
- Automatically assign new tasks to individuals based on previously assigned
workflow roles
You can optionally choose to update task time estimates based on the latest
workflow percentages.