Team Set-Up Recommendations

A Team is a designation in the Secure Code Warrior® platform that groups users together. You can organize them by

• Division
• Development Center 
• Geography
• Product Line

To get started quickly, check out the video below for a run-through of how you can leverage teams and tags. Keep scrolling down to the rest of the article for some useful examples and advice as well.

While there’s no limit to the number of teams an account can have, we generally recommend that

• Teams have enough developers so their training leaderboard view (which shows individual progress against their team’s progress) offers meaningful information
• You consider the amount of movement between teams and minimize ongoing administration within the platform. This can be done by choosing broad enough team structures.

How to Leverage a Single Team Hierarchy to Organize Teams and Leverage Tags

It’s important to put some thought into the best ways to structure teams and use tags. 

A suggested approach would be to start by considering the hierarchy and organization structure within your business and note them all down.  This often includes:

Once you’ve identified the primary organization structures, you can then determine which are primary vs. secondary for your organization.  As an example, this may look like:

At this stage, you can start to determine if there’s a team naming convention that combines the ideal intersection of desired primary naming conventions.  

As for the others, consider what will be needed to search for users within Secure Code Warrior as well as what will be used for offline reporting purposes. This is where you can start using Tags.

Many organizations have acronyms for some of the groupings above. This can help create streamlined and logical naming conventions.

We’ve put together some examples of teams and tags for you below.

Example 1

• Team name:   <Line of Business> - <Product or Service Line>
• Example: “CB - Product X”
• Tags: Region; Hub / City / Location
• Example (2 Tags): “APAC; Delhi”

Example 2

• Team name: <Region> - <Hub / City / Location> - <Product or Service Line>
• Example: “NA - San Francisco - Service Y”
• Tags: Division; Country
• Example (2 tags): “Enterprise; US”

In the end, there’s no right or wrong way to go about naming. It really comes down to your company’s organizational structure and the information needed to support your metrics and reporting within Secure Code Warrior and beyond. 

The goal is to use naming conventions and identifiers that will best support your program overall.

For more info on how to invite users on an individual-by-individual or team-by-team basis, click here.

Why is all this Important?

Our metrics reporting module contains data you can view by teams that can help with analyzing how a team is performing or even how one team is performing against another.  It also offers a view of usage by teams.

You can also download .CSV data or set up an API that includes both team and tag information so more detailed analysis can be done, either in Microsoft Excel or within your own reporting tool. 

Team designations limit user access. What this means is that Team Managers can only view the metrics and progress of developers in their specific teams, so t’s important to consider who you’d like to assign the role of Team Manager. You want to avoid getting too granular with your teams and respective managers as you might inadvertently limit visibility and access within the platform.

It’s better to think more broadly with teams so managers have wider visibility. You can always get more granular with tags if you need to for metrics analysis, but keep in mind that going too granular can also be difficult for administrators to manage.

 If you’d like more info on how to assign an appropriate role in the platform, check out this article.