Departments in TaskRely

One project is often several teams working on different slices of the same thing - design, development, content, and so on. Departments let you split a single project into separate working groups like that, each with its own board, instead of spinning up a whole new project for every team.

What you get by default

Open a project and you land on its list of departments before anything else. Unless you've changed them, every new project starts with the same six: Research, Development, Content Writing, SEO, Social Media Management, and Production Management. These are created automatically no matter what - even if you skip every other default when setting up the project, departments still get created, since a project needs at least one to assign work to.

None of that is fixed. Rename them to match your actual teams, delete the ones you don't need, or add new ones from Settings → Departments.

What a department has

Click into a department and it's essentially its own workspace. It has its own Board, List, Calendar, Workload, and Timeline - the same views covered elsewhere in these guides, just scoped to that department's own tasks. It has its own Planning/Diagrams tab for freeform flowcharts and mind maps, and its own Tools tab, which is just a short reference list of links and resources that team keeps handy - added and edited the same way as labels or statuses.

A department also has its own Reports tab, though that one's not open to everyone - see below.

Who can see which department

A project owner or admin sees every department automatically. Everyone else only sees the ones they've actually been assigned to - assigning someone to a department is done from Manage access, where each member can be given one or more departments. Someone with no department assigned won't find any in their list at all.

Department leads

Each department can have one lead, set from Settings → Departments, just below the department list. The dropdown only offers people who are both an admin or manager in your organization and already a member of this project - a plain member can't be made a lead. Being a lead gives someone two things a regular member doesn't have: they can see that department's Reports tab even without being a project admin, and they can manage who's on that department's roster.