structured project information in Team central?

[Arnd Layer]

I am frequently working with customers who want to collect specific information on a project level. Things like customer, country or region, volume, ...

My standard approach is defining an issue type in Jira to collect all this metadata. But this solution has its limitations, e.g. that there should be only one set of meta data per project.

Could Team Central become a place to collect project metadata? This would require the ability to define custom fields on a project level.

[Mary Raleigh]

Hi @Arnd Layer , great question! In fact I'd argue that a key differentiator in Team Central, compared to more free form ways of communicating project status, is our structured dataset. The current metadata we capture for your project includes:

• Status (On track, At risk, Off track) by week
• Project contributors 
• Target date (and when/how many times that date is changed)
• Goal the project contributes to
• Dependency relationships to other projects (dependent on, depended on by)
• Count of followers
• And of course my favorite, labels that allow you to capture programs 

Today, labels offer the best way to organize groups of projects and goals by the categories you have listed above. 

Adding a label to any goal or project enables a custom view of all projects and goals with those labels. The custom view includes:

• Count of people allocated across each project
• Summary of projects by status
• Summary of goals by status
• A high level roadmap view
• And a summary of completed and paused projects

In the future we may offer more custom fields, possibly as part of a paid tier. Would you be interested in participating in our pricing research to help us understand how you value custom fields in Team Central and share more of how you would use it? If so feel free to reach out to me at mary@atlassian.com!

[Arnd Layer]

Thank you, @Mary Raleigh for your comments. I am looking forward to what's coming in Team Central. Surely, it is hard to find the balance between customisation options and not making the product too complicated.

As a consultant, I am primarily considering what would be required to create something to our customers that brings value to them. And this is always based on how they work today. And I am sure that most of them today would ask for some predefined taxonomy in addition to label based folksonomy. Also, numbers will not make sense in labels.