A Workspace in HacknPlan is an entity that represents a company, team, or individual that is the owner of one or more projects, meaning they have full control and ownership of them. There are two types of workspace:

• Personal workspace: Each user account has their own personal workspace, where projects created by them are located. A personal workspace can contain unlimited free projects with limited features.
• Studio workspace: A Studio workspace is an additional workspace you obtain when you subscribe to the HacknPlan Studio tier. Besides projects, this workspace can also contain users, and the number of users it can contain depends on the purchased seats. All the projects and users inside a Studio workspace enjoy the premium features, and both the workspace and the projects inside are owned by the user who subscribed.

You can access a workspace by clicking on the dropdown at the top-left corner of the application, and then clicking on the house icon. You can also navigate to a project directly by expanding the workspace element and clicking on any project item inside. Also, when you are on a project, you can go to its workspace quickly by clicking on the Go to workspace button at the bottom of the left menu.

The Workspace dashboards

The workspace page provides three different dashboards that will help you get an overview of your work in a cross-project way. This is really helpful if you are a studio or publisher working on multiple projects at the same time. The dashboards are:

• My dashboard: This is the default dashboard and is accessible by any user in the workspace, including Personal ones. It gives you an overview of your own work (projects you’re working on, grouped metrics, ongoing tasks, events…) and is great for normal users as a starting point for your working day. From there, you can click on a project, task or event to start the actual work.
• Workspace dashboard (Studio): This is a similar dashboard to the previous one except the information displayed is global for the whole workspace, including all projects and users. This dashboard is only available to administrators and is a good way to get an overview of your progress at a company level.
• User dashboard (Studio): The user dashboard allows workspace administrators to get an overview of the work of individual users in the context of the workspace, pretty much as everyone can do for themselves in My dashboard. This dashboard is great for administrators to get a quick look at the workload of each individual user of the company.

Managing projects

When you subscribe to the Studio plan and the workspace is created, the first step is importing your existing projects into the workspace, so you can start enjoying the premium features you paid for. The owner or any of the administrators can import their personal projects into the workspace by clicking on the “Import” button located at the top of the left panel of the Administration -> Projects section of your workspace. A list of your personal projects will be displayed for selection.

Note: When a project is imported into the Studio workspace, all the users in the project are automatically added to the workspace too. All the users enjoying the premium features included in HacknPlan Studio need to be part of the workspace and occupy a paid seat. If you are trying to import a project that contains more new users to add than available seats, it will throw an error.

You can also create a new project by clicking on the New button on the project panel, clicking on New → Project on the left menu,  or pressing P on your keyboard. The main difference between the creation of a personal Project and a Studio one is the fact that you can use another existing project as a template. When you are creating a project in a Studio workspace; there will be a step where you’ll be able to select an existing project as a template,  and will also show a list of switches where you can choose which elements you want to be copied to the new project:

• Master data: This option is mandatory. It copies the base configuration of the project, including categories, stages, design element types, importance levels, tags and roles.
• Users: Adds to the new project the same users the template one has.
• Boards: Copies the open boards and milestones in the template project, including dates and descriptions.
• Game design model: Replicates the game design model structure in the new project.
• Work items: Copies all the tasks and user stories in the template project into the new one. If the boards, users or game design model haven’t been selected for templating, the related values on the copied tasks will be set to a default state. Also, the copied tasks do not keep the same status they had on the template project; they are reset to the Planned stage (or your first custom stage with status Created) and things like comments and activity won’t be replicated.

Users and teams (Studio)

When you need to add a new user to one or more of your projects, you need to add them to the workspace first. Go to Administration → Users from the left menu to manage the users that are part of your workspace.

You can add a new user to the workspace by clicking on the Add users button on the section header. This will open up a dialog similar to the one available to add users to Personal projects, but there are a few differences:

• Team: If you’ve created teams in your Studio workspace, you can directly add the user to one of them. We will go deeper into teams in a while.
• Projects: You can select which projects the new user will be added automatically to (with default read-only permissions).

As your team grows, managing more and more users can become a challenge. There are more likely to be working on different projects and not everyone is involved in the same work. For this reason, you can create Teams in the Studio workspace to better organize users.  We strongly recommend relatively small teams, as it’s common in Scrum methodology (+- 7 members), and divide bigger projects into some smaller projects that can be logically isolated. This would make working with different teams much more efficient and productive.

You can create a new team by clicking on the button New team on the Users and teams panel. You can also drag and drop users to move them from one team to another, and update the name of a team or even delete it using the ellipsis button located on the right side of the team item. If you delete a team that has members, they will be reassigned to the Unassigned section. You also have an Inactive section that displays the users that were part of the workspace but were pushed out.

Note: You can add full teams to projects by clicking on the Add team button from the project Administration → Users & Permissions section. All users in the team will be added to the project, but once they are added they can be modified individually. Adding new users to a team doesn’t automatically add them to the projects the team was added to, it’s just a convenience to add several users at a time, but no direct link is created between the team and the project.