Adding your team

HacknPlan is a collaborative tool, especially useful for teams, so you can add other users to your project. Go to Administration -> Users & permissions on your project left menu:

You can invite a new user to your project by clicking on the Add user button on the header of the Users panel. Depending if you are working on a Personal project, or it is part of a Studio Workspace, this will work differently:

• Personal projects: A popup will appear to enter the email address of the user you want to add to your project. There are two options:
  • Send an invitation email if the user is not registered: When the email you insert does not belong to an existing HacknPlan user, an email is sent inviting the user to register. When the user does so, they are automatically added to the project.
  • The new user is the administrator of the project: The user is automatically provided with administrative rights, which allows them to add other users, create milestones, update the game model and many other actions.
• Studio projects: When the project is part of a Studio Workspace, this behaves differently: a popup is launched for you to select a user to add among the Workspace members that are not part of the project yet. When you are on a Studio subscription, only users belonging to the Workspace can be part of the project. Adding users to a Workspace is covered here.

Additionally, if the project is in a Studio Workspace, you can add a complete team to the project with the button Add team. Teams are defined at Workspace level by the administrator.

Setting permissions

After adding users to a project, you would probably like to edit their permissions, as everything is set as read-only by default. HacknPlan offers simple permission scheme based on the existing task categories. This allows you to have control over which kind of tasks each user can see or modify. It also allows you to determine who can see or edit the game design model and create user stories. Click on the ellipsis icon of the users on the list and then click on Edit permissions or just double click on the user itself. If will open the permissions dialog:

You can set a different access level for each one of the task categories in your project, which goes from no access at all to full edition permissions:

• No access: The user won’t be able to see any information (including tasks and metrics) about the category.
• Read-only: The user can access to the category data (board, tasks, metrics…) but can’t create, modify or delete any of it.
• Update only: The user can perform a very limited set of actions, oriented to update the tasks they have been assigned to, but can’t create or delete anything, nor modify most information of the tasks in the category like category, milestone, description or assigned users. This level is very useful for users with very limited power within your team, like contractors or temporary employees. The list of available actions are:
  • Move assigned tasks among status columns and sort them using drag and drop.
  • Update the current cost (in order to report progress).
  • Complete or re-open sub-tasks.
  • Add attachments and set them as cover.
  • Add comments.
• Full write: The user can create, edit and delete tasks from the category.

You can also give project administration rights to a user, which not only gives full permissions for all categories, but also allows them to manage project master data like categories, subcategories, and element types.

You can also configure the access to the Game Design Model, one of the key sections of HacknPlan. This way, you can decide which users can read the detailed documentation where all the game mechanics and features are defined and if they have rights to create new elements and modify the existing ones. The available levels are:

• No access: The user can’t access the Game Design Model section. This setting, however, does not prevent the user from viewing the design elements a work item belongs to, or even the complete GDM structure, if the user has reading or writing permissions over its category. The content like description, attachments or metrics won’t be accessible, though.
• Read-only: The user has access to the GDM section and can read all the information, but can’t create or update elements.
• Full write: The user can add new elements, edit and delete the existing ones.

Role-based permissions (Studio only)

HacknPlan Studio project administrators can define roles, which are predefined sets of permissions that can be directly assigned to a user, simplifying the setup of new team members. The roles can be created and maintained from the Administration -> Roles section.

Transfer ownership of project (Personal only)

The current owner of the project can transfer the ownership of the project from the permissions dialog. Read more.