4. Teams

Teams serve as both an entity representing your organization in Cortex and as owners for different entities in the catalogs. Teams offers a centralized place for the most important information about each group, making it easier for everyone to find what they need.

Teams can be assessed via Scorecards, interact with integrations, and leverage Custom Data. They can also be configured in a hierarchy.

To view your teams, navigate to Catalogs > Teams.

When you open the Teams page, you'll see Mine and All, which denote teams you belong to and all teams at your organization, respectively. The teams that appear under "All" will automatically display as a hierarchy, whereas those under "Mine" will be listed individually.

Each team has its own details page, where you can view key details about the team. At the top, you’ll find on-call information, Slack channels, and parent and children teams.

Additional information appears in tabs on the team's details page:

• The Overview tab shows a high-level view of how the team is performing across Scorecards. By default, this will show the level that the team’s entities have reached in each Scorecard.
  • Below the Scorecards section, you can find where the selected team belongs within the broader Hierarchy.
    
• The Members tab includes a list of all team members, as well as their contact information. You can also add tags for each user to signify each member’s role on the team. When available, Cortex will also pull in profile photos from your Git provider.
• The Entities tab shows a list of all entities that belong to the team. Above the search bar, there’s a note that indicates how many entities the team is directly responsible for.
• The Links tab contains links to important resources for a team, including onboarding guides, best practices documents, and runbooks for current projects.

Leaderboard

The Leaderboard allows everyone to see the ten best performing teams within your organization. You can find the leaderboard on the Teams catalog page.

Cortex will average all Scorecard scores for each team to generate ranks by default, but you can use the dropdown to view the leaderboard based on specific Scorecards.

The leaderboard gamifies entity quality and encourages team members to achieve goals. This creates a culture of accountability, where everyone can see how they’re performing. Plus, it never hurts to inspire a bit of healthy competition between teams.

Ownership

Teams not only allow you to collect vital information in a single place, but are also crucial for ownership. Rather than assign an entity to individual team members, you can assign ownership to an entire team. This makes it easy to assign multiple team members to an entity, and it ensures that when a team’s composition changes, ownership is updated accordingly.

Read more in the Ownership documentation.

Creating a team

You have two options for creating a team: You can import a team from an identity provider, like Workday or GitHub, or you can Create team manually.

See the tabs below for instructions on each method.

Import teams

If you have an existing source of truth for your teams and team members, we recommend importing teams. By integrating with your identity provider at this stage, Cortex will automatically sync team pages with your source of truth so you don't have to update information in more than one place when people join or leave teams.

caution

To import teams at this stage, your integrations with those third parties must already be established. Any available identity providers will be available on this page.

1. In Cortex, navigate to Catalogs > Teams, then click Create Team.
2. Select Team, then select the integration to import from. A list of teams from the integration will appear at the bottom of the page; click on the team you want to import.
3. The team name and identifier are pre-populated based on the team you selected. Optionally, add a description for the team. C
4. Click Add Slack channel, then select a channel.
   • You must have the Slack integration configured before you can choose a channel.
   • You can enable or disable Notifications at this stage. If notifications are enabled, team members will receive Slack messages when there are important updates to Scorecards, Initiatives, and more for entities that they own.
5. Configure parent teams, children teams, and an on-call service.
   • The teams that you configure will automatically be reflected within the hierarchy in Cortex.
6. Click Add link to add links to key resources, such as your Confluence space, Jira projects, or charter documents.
7. Click Save team.

Because you’re importing the team from a third party, the import flow does not include an option to add Core members. You can, however, add Additional members at this stage.

tip

Additional members don't typically act as entity owners in Cortex, but are still part of the functional team, and will receive notifications.

Create team manually

If you don’t have an identity provider with updated team information, you can create a team manually within Cortex. Because teams are important for effective ownership, it's recommended that you create teams in Cortex even if you don't have a single source of truth for team information.

1. In Cortex, navigate to Catalogs > Teams, then click Create Team.
2. Select Team, select Create team manually, then click Continue.
3. Configure the team details:
   • Name:
   • Identifier:
   • Short description:
4. Add team members:
   • Team members from your workspace: Select members from the list to add as team members. To add a member manually, click Add member.
     • The team members you choose here will be marked as owners of entities and receive notifications about entities owned by the team, if notifications are enabled.
5. Click Add Slack channel, then select a channel.
   • You must have the Slack integration configured before you can choose a channel.
   • You can enable or disable Notifications at this stage. If notifications are enabled, team members will receive Slack messages when there are important updates to Scorecards, Initiatives, and more for entities that they own.
6. Configure parent teams, children teams, and an on-call service.
   • • The teams that you configure will automatically be reflected within the hierarchy in Cortex.
7. Click Add link to add links to key resources, such as your Confluence space, Jira projects, or charter documents.
8. Click Save team.

Once you've created a team, you'll be able to find it on the Teams page within the hierarchy. If you haven't added parents or children, you can disable View as hierarchy to see the list of all teams.

Adding team member roles

It is also possible for an admin to manually create a team member role:

1. In Cortex, navigate to the entity settings page:
   1. Click your avatar in the lower left corner then click Settings.
   2. Under "Workspace," click Entities, then click the Teams tab.
2. Click Add role.
3. In the "Add role" modal, configure the role:
   • Role name: Enter the role's name.
   • Tag: The tag - a unique identifier for the role - automatically populates based on the role name.
   • Role description: Enter a description of the role.
4. Click Save.

When you view the list of team member roles on the entity settings page, you can see whether the role was manually created or pulled in through an integration.

Apply role to team members

You can apply a role only to manually-created team members. Team members who were imported from an identity integration will retain the role that was imported.

To apply a role:

1. In Cortex, navigate to Catalogs > Teams.
2. Click into a team.
3. In the upper right corner, click Configure entity.
4. On the left, click Members.
5. Next to a team member, click the edit icon.
   • A modal will appear where you can select a role.
6. Click Update member.

Adjusting team settings

Under Settings > Entities, there are several settings relating to teams:

Add team member roles

This process is described above, under Adding team member roles.

Enable identity providers

In this section, you can select which identity providers will be used to sync team and team memberships into Cortex.

On the Catalogs > Teams page, you will see the option to import teams from the enabled IdPs listed here.

Enable auto import of teams

Enable this setting to auto import any discovered teams and team relationships from Workday. In order for teams to be imported, Workday needs to be enabled under the "Enable identity providers" section on this settings page. The Workday report must include the managerEmail field in order for team relationships to be auto imported.

Enable team ownership entity editing

When enabled, entities can only be edited by specific members of the team that own them. Read more about this feature in Team ownership entity editing.