How to set up departments

A department is a team inside your workspace, with a roster, one or more leads, a colour, an icon and its own task views. Settings › Departments is where they are built.

Get these right first. Almost every permission in Tideswell is checked against a task's department rather than the workspace, so departments are the shape everything else takes.

How do you create one?

One dialog does the whole thing: name it, pick one of five colours, pick an icon, choose its starting members and leads, and set its sub-task defaults.

Do it in one sitting rather than creating an empty team and filling it later. The roster and the leads are what make the department useful the moment somebody opens it.

The colour and icon can be changed later but never cleared once set, and the dialog says so.

How many should you have?

As many as you have real teams, and no more.

The test is whether the group has work that is genuinely theirs and somebody accountable for it. Marketing, Production and Warehouse are departments. "Everyone who touches the autumn drop" is a campaign, per How to set up a campaign.

Too many departments makes permissions fiddly and puts a long list in the sidebar. Too few means everybody can edit everybody's work.

What is "What this team plans"?

The singular word this team uses for a planned item: Editorial, Prep, Visit. The plural is worked out for you.

That word appears on the team's project planning spine, so a warehouse team plans Preps and a content team plans Editorials. It is a small thing that makes the product read like it was built for that team.

See How to plan what goes out and when.

What are sub-task templates?

Rules that pre-fill what gets created when a planned item becomes a task.

For each sub-task type, set a default assignee, a due-date offset in days relative to the parent, and a default priority. An offset of -2 means two days before the parent's date.

So "when a Blog Post is promoted, always assign it to Dana, due three days out, at normal priority" is set once and applied every time.

A department starts with no templates, which is deliberate: the catalog is a menu to add from rather than a list every team is given. A team with none gets an empty sub-task picker on its projects, by design.

The types you can choose from come from How to set up the kinds of work your team does.

How do you retire a department?

Two different actions, and the difference matters.

Archive hides it and keeps everything. Its chat category is hidden and its history stays. Archived departments take no new members and are left out of the invite and assignment pickers.

Delete is permanent. If the department still holds projects, tasks or repeating schedules, the dialog makes you pick which team takes them over first, so work is never orphaned.

Delete cannot proceed at all if there is nowhere to move the work to, and it tells you to create another department first.

Archive unless you have a real reason to delete. Archiving is reversible and deleting is not.

What does a department scope?

Its own task list, board and calendar. Its projects. Its chat channel permissions. Its planning vocabulary and sub-task defaults.

And most importantly, who can do what to its work. A lead of Marketing is not a lead of Warehouse, which is the thing to explain to everybody once. See How to work out who can do what in your workspace.