Teams
The vast majority of reports in Echoes are organized around teams, making their configuration crucial to using the product.
Teams in Echoes form a tree hierarchy. That is, a team can have sub-teams and so on. Each team level is thus an interesting aggregation point for reported efforts. Members in your organization should be dispatched into teams. Members can be dispatched at any level of the organization. At any given time, a member is dispatched into one team at most. Otherwise, members can be left in the Undispatched special-team.
To make the best use of Echoes, teams should reflect a structure that is of importance for you, and members should be dispatched accordingly. Also, companies evolve with time. Thus, work is required to keep Echoes team and members dispatching up to date.
When a member changes of team, we still keep track of the past membership so that the allocation of efforts as seen in the past is correct in your Dashboards.
We provide three main ways to configure your team tree and the memberships: a manual setup, a CSV import, and a Human Resource Information System (HRIS) connector.
The answer will strongly depend on your adoption-level of Echoes and your typical company changes. If you are merely trying Echoes out, you may be satisfied with the manual configuration. If your HRIS is well maintained and has up-to-date team organization, consider the synchronisation with HRIS as it requires almost no intervention besides the initial setup. The import from CSV is an in-between but may require some dedicated person to update Echoes periodically.
No. First, very few organizations have a team layout in their GitHub or GitLab organization which maps to reality. Second, Echoes requires the concept of a join date, and keeps track of how a given member of the organization changes teams over time.
Q: I upload my CSV, then I upload the same CSV again and Echoes tells me there are changes, what is going on?
Sorry, you've definitely hit a bug and this should not happen. Contact us and we will happily work on fixing the issue.