What are tags?
In general tags are a way to categorise people and teams. They are highly customisable and could relate to many things such as skills, cost centre, funding source, leave type, etc.
Tags provide a visual flag and a way of discovering groups of people or teams “tagged” within a category.
People and teams can be linked with multiple different tags without limitation.
There are also advanced use cases allowed in TeamForm where tags can be used to specify requirements during workforce planning, or be linked to other elements such as comments or membership specifications.
What are common use cases for tags?
Linking people with tags
Tags can be used for people to highlight their “hatted role” for example, an “Agile Coach” tag. This is useful because an hatted role may be different from an individual’s official role or job title. Defining a list or tags to capture these “Specialities” can allow an organisation to easily label these individuals so they can be found through search, or by visually identifying through use of a “badge” (see below).
Linking teams with tags
Tags can also be used for teams to group them by a commonality not already included in their work hierarchy. For example to highlight common tools or 3rd party applications they use to do their work, or their type in a given lexicon (e.g. “Enabling Team” in the lexicon from Team Topologies).
Other use cases for tags
Advanced applications for Tags can be used in many more contexts, such as
Skills repository –bringing skills in as tags against each individual. See https://teamform.atlassian.net/wiki/x/EoCXo
Funding information –bringing in cost centres, funding source categories and any other information as tags so they can be attached to people and/or teams.
Resource Availability –to indicate who’s available by displaying who’s on what type of leave.
Etc.
For details on when tags should or shouldn’t be used, refer to When to use Tag vs People Attributes
What are the 3 different kinds of tags?
Simple Tags
The 2 fundamental elements that make up a ‘tag’ in TeamForm are:
Tag Type –The broad category of what the tag is about or the purpose the tag serves.
E.g.: dissociate roles between “Agile” and “Traditional”, therefore creating a tag type as “Agile Role”.Tag Value –The label that fit under the broad category umbrella of the tag type.
E.g.: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Transformation Leads.
Each simple tag created is associated to a given type but represented as a single data point based on its value. For example, Product Owner, Scrum Master and Transformation Leads are 3 separate tag values within the Agile Role tag type, hence represented as 3 separate individual tags.
Tags with Attributes
An single tag value can store additional data information often referred to as tag attributes.
For example, given a Cost Centre tag type, we can store the name of the different cost centres of the organisation as individual values. Say Cyber Security, IT Support and Marketing. Now for each of these individual cost centre, we are allowed to store additional information as attributes. For instance: the technical Cost Center ID used in the budgeting system, its Funding Source, the name of the department it is Owned By and the Time Frame it is set for.
So for an individual tag associated to a specific value for this type:
Tag type: Cost Centre
Tag Value: Cyber Security
Tag Attribute - Cost Centre ID: 123456
Tag Attribute - Funding Source: OPEX
Tag Attribute - Owned By: CIO
Tag Attribute - Time Frame: FY2025
Attributes can be entered in as a simple text information, or can reference other existing people or team information within TeamForm also known as ‘entities’.
There are 2 types of attributes within TeamForm and each have it’s unique behaviour to tags:
Common attributes - Data stored within the tag value is applicable to multiple teams or people, hence changing one value of the attribute within the tag value will change it for all teams and/or people with the same tag value. For example, two people are tagged as ‘2025 Graduate’ and have the same “completion date” as of March 31st 2024. If I update the completion date to April 1st 2024, both people with the 2025 Graduate tag will now have an updated completion date.
Unique attributes - Data stored within the same common tag value is unique to the team and/or person with the tag which means changing one value of the attribute within the tag will not change for all teams and/or people with the same tag value. For example, two people can be tagged as “Departing” but have unique “departure dates” as attributes, where departure date is an unique tag for the Departing tag.
Tags with attributes in the tag name: Attributes can be configured to be included in the tag name. Multiple attributes can be concatenated together to form longer dynamic tag names.
To understand how to enable and bulk import tags with attributes refer to Bulk import Tags with attributes (common attributes)
For how-to guide on usage, refer to Import Tags with Unique Attributes
Reserved tags: Team Topology & Miro app
TeamForm supports using Team Topology team types and interaction modes.
These tags cannot be edited in the App UI and need to have their tags pre-populated via an integration.
If you are looking to recreate this behaviour you can use the pre-populated tagTypes and populate the tags in a similar way to the link above.
These two tagTypes (TEAM_TOPOLOGY and INTERACTION_MODE) only work if you are using the Miro TeamForm plug-in to author the associations and attributes.
See this article for more information on how this works How to use the Miro Team Topologies plug-in
What attributes can be sourced from TeamForm?
Existing TeamForm information can be stored as attributes within tags. This includes:
Specific person that exists in TeamForm
Specific Tag Type
Teams that exists in TeamForm
Other manual attributes that are allowed in tag types are:
Text
Date
Number and Integers
Where can tag information come from?
2 main sources that can coexist:
Tags are data stored in TeamForm (manual entry, bulk import, etc) → TeamForm is the source of truth for this information
Tags are source come from somewhere else (ex: a Skills systems, HRIS, Portfolio Management) → TeamForm shows the information and we recommend that users don’t edit it in TeamForm
Limitations to a tag
Users cannot search by a specific tag type in Planner or Forecast as search is only permitted at tag values level
You cannot download a list of tags based on an UI search, this needs to be done via backend reports