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:

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:

Reapplying a workflow will make the following changes:

You can optionally choose to update task time estimates based on the latest workflow percentages.