Learning TeamFlow

Building the Team

Initially, all Jim Phelps knows is that he has received a mission from The Secretary. Therefore he begins building his TeamFlow model by adding himself and The Secretary to the team. The first thing you always do with TeamFlow is to assemble your team. (Team first, Flow second - if it were the other way around, we would have called it FlowTeam).

TeamFlow stores all the information about potential team members in its Team Database, which is drawn in the left pane of the TeamView Worksheet as an organization chart. Members of the team field are drawn from the team database. A team member must be in the team database before it may be added to the team field. However, there may be team database members who are not selected as team members. This allows Jim Phelps to create a team database with all the members of his IMF that he may save and use from model to model. He then selects from the database only those members whose skills he needs for this particular mission's team.

The same team database member may appear in multiple TeamView worksheets in the same model. TeamFlow prevents the same team member from inadvertently being added more than once to the same team field. As the information about a member of the team database is revised, the changes are automatically reflected in all the places the member appears in the model.

For the purposes of this example, we will assume that Jim does not have a preexisting team database from which he can easily select his team members. Instead, we will follow along as he builds a new team database from scratch.

Open a new worksheet either by selecting New from the File menu, or by clicking the New Document tool button (the left-most button on the toolbar - it looks like a blank sheet of paper).

The new worksheet is created with one team member - appropriately named "The Team" - already in the Org Chart. This member, which forms the root of the organization structure may be renamed, but may not be deleted.

The Team Member information window, shown in the lower right of the diagram, automatically opens. This window is where you enter the text that describes the team members. This window contains seven data fields and five buttons. For now, we are only interested in the Name field.

Jim's first task is to add himself and The Secretary to the team database. To add a new member to the team database, position the mouse in the empty area below the root "The Team" entry in the Org Chart pane.

The status bar at the bottom of the window will say "Click here to add a new entry to the Team Database" when you are pointing at the right place. That is the status bar's job - it always tells you what will happen if you click the mouse at its current location. If nothing will happen, the default message is "For Help, click the '?' toolbar button".

Click the mouse button in the empty area below the root "The Team" entry in the Org Chart pane to add a new member to the org chart.