What are tags?
What are tags?
In general tags are a way to categorise people and teams. They are highly customisable and can include things like skills, cost centre, funding source, leave type, etc.
Tags provide a visual flag and a way of discovering people or teams “tagged” i.e. within a category. Against the person or team they can have multiple different tags against them.
There are also advance use cases of tags that is allowed in TeamForm where it can be used to specify requirements during workforce planning, linked to comments and specification of memberships.
What are common use cases for tags?
Tags can be used for people to highlight their agile “hatted role” for example, a “Agile Coach” tag. This is useful because an agile role may be different from an individual’s role title. Defining a list of “Specialist” tags allows 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).
Tags can be used for teams to group teams by things they have in common (where this information is not already included in a work hierarchy), for example applications worked on, or team topology type (e.g. “Enabling Team”).
Other use cases of tags:
Skills repository - bringing skills in as tags against each individual
Funding information - bringing in cost centres, funding source categories and any other information in as tags that can be attached to people and/or teams
Resource Availability - to indicate who’s available by displaying who’s on what type of leave
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
There 2 fundamental elements that make up a ‘tag’ in TeamForm. They are: Tags can simply contain a type and a value:
Tag Type - This is the broad category of what the tag is about or the purpose the tag serves. eg: identify agile roles, therefore the tag type is then ‘Agile Role’
Tag Value - These are the values that fit under the broad category umbrella of the tag type. eg: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Transformation Leads
Simple tags are tag types that contain a single data point / tag value within each tag created. For example, Product Owner, Scrum Master and Transformation Leads are 3 separate tag values creating 3 separate individual tags within the same category of ‘Agile Role’ tag type.
Tags with Attributes
Within a single tag value we can store additional data information which is often referred to as ‘tag attributes’. For example within the ‘Cost Centre’ tag type, we have cost centre ID 123456 as the tag value and we now want to nest additional information such as CAPEX or OPEX associated to cost centre ID 123456.
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