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 (also referred to as groups) 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 What are skills?
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
Tag attributes need to be toggled on in the workspace setting.
What are Tag Attributes?
An single tag value can store additional data information often referred to as tag attributes.
Tag attributes can contain simple information like:
Text;
Date;
Numbers; or
Integers.
They can also reference:
Existing groups (team);
Person; or
Tag type.
These later are also known as ‘entities’.
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 [integer]
Tag Attribute - Funding Source: OPEX [text]
Tag Attribute - Owned By: CIO [person]
Tag Attribute - Time Frame: FY2025 [text]
The two kinds of Tag Attributes
Common attributes
Data stored as value with a common tag attribute will be applicable to all entities tagged with it. Hence changing the value of the attribute will update it for all groups, people or tag type associated with that tag attribute.
For example, people tagged as 2025 Graduate –a value for the Credential tag type– all share the same Completion Date as of March 31st 2024. If I update this completion date to April 1st 2024, all people tagged as 2025 Graduate will now have display this updated completion date.
To understand how to enable and bulk import tags with attributes refer to Bulk import Tags with attributes (common attributes).
Unique attributes
It is possible to make the information contained as the value of a tag attribute unique to the entity it labels. Which means that changing the value of the tag attribute will not change for all entities associated with it.
For example, two people can be tagged as Departing but have unique departure dates as attributes. Changing the date for one won’t affect the date of the other.
See also more information on how to Import Tags with Unique Attributes.
Using attributes in the tag name
Attributes can be configured to be included in the tag name. Multiple attributes can be concatenated together with underscores to form longer dynamic tag names.
Reserved tags: Team Topology & Miro app
TeamForm supports using the lexicon from Team Topology team types and interaction modes to organise teams with tags.
These tags cannot be edited in the App UI and need to be imported via integration.
The TeamForm’s plug-in in Miro is the only way to create new tag values, attributes and associations for the two reserved tag types Interaction Mode and Team Topology available by default in Settings > Manage Tags.
See this article for more information on how this works How to use the Miro Team Topologies plug-in
Which source of truth for tags?
Tags can coexist between TeamForm and other Enterprise HRIS. This leads to two scenarios:
An HRIS other than TeamForm is source of truth –Tags are sourced from a Skills System, Portfolio Management tool or else and kept up to date in TeamForm through regular imports. In which case we recommend that users don’t edit the tags in TeamForm are those changes would be erased by subsequent imports.
TeamForm is source of truth –Tags are created and/or subsequently updated and maintained in TeamForm. Upon import, TeamForm information prevail.
Limitations in tags usage
Users cannot search by a specific tag type in Planner or Forecast as search is only permitted at tag values level
A list of tags based on an search in the UI can't be downloaded. Extraction can however be done through back-end reporting.