Working with Contract Teams

Objective

After completing this lesson, you will be able to manage the contract team based on stakeholder roles.

Contract Workspace Teams

When you create a contract workspace, you specify a team of users to work on the project.

A project team consists of project groups. Each project group has different roles, which specify the permissions for the users in that group for the CW in question. The permissions specify the objects (documents and tasks) the users can access and what actions the users can perform in that project. Creating groups with different roles enables you to assign users with different responsibilities to the project team. Group permissions determine:

Ownership
Visibility
Editing capabilities
Review and approval

Group members can be individual team members or groups. For example, Legal is a system group. System groups differ from project groups. Project groups are specific groups of people that are working on a project. System groups function for all SAP Ariba solutions, not just a single project. However, you can add a system group to a project group to associate all system group members with the project.

View of the Team tab of a contract workspace, displaying contract groups and members.

Note

Groups defined in a project differ from those you add from the Ariba Administrator page. Creating a group of users in Ariba Administrator allows administrators to organize the users into a group but does not associate the group with any projects. However, groups defined this way can be added to team projects, as is the case with Legal in the screenshot above.

Roles and Group Assignment

Generally, SAP Ariba Contracts templates will be set up with all the necessary project groups. Some project groups may have some members already assigned. Most of the time, contract workspace owners will not have to create new project groups but will need to assign members to the existing project groups.

Assigning Roles

Every project team has a Project Owner group. In general terms, the Project Owner is the most powerful group in a project. It always has special capabilities and access rights, independent of any roles assigned to it.

You must have project owner capabilities (be a member of the Project Owner group or a project team member who meets the requirements) to create project groups. When creating project groups, consider the following helpful hints:

The most commonly assigned roles are Active Team Member and Observer Team Member.
If you are adding supplier users to a workspace, assign the supplier users to a group with the Team Member with Limited Access role.
When creating project templates, you can include a project group with the Observer Team Member role, even if you do not have an immediate need for this role. The contract owner can then add members once the CW is created.

Through the Active Team Member role membership, users can add tasks and documents to a project. Specifically, users in a group with the Active Team Member role can:

View and create the following items in the project:
- Tasks, including adding task reviewers or approvers and adding comments when they are an active reviewer, approver, or watcher in a task.
- Documents, including subprojects, for which they have the appropriate access.
- Message board entries and announcements.
View project groups.
Receive any project-related notifications, such as notifications for project status changes.
Create follow-on projects.

Note

Users with the Active Team Member role cannot add or edit project groups, copy or delete the project, or edit project attributes.

In general terms, the Observer Team Member role can view information about a project but cannot create tasks or documents. Specifically, users in a group with the Observer Team Member role can:

Create or edit project announcements.
View project groups.
View tasks.
View documents, including subprojects, for which they have access.

Note

Users with the Observer Team Member role cannot add or edit project groups, copy or delete the project, edit project attributes, or create either documents or tasks.

Users in a group with the Team Member with Limited Access role can:

View and create tasks.
View and create documents, including subprojects, for which they have the appropriate access.
View project groups.
Create follow-on projects.
View and create message board entries and announcements.

Non-Team Member Involvement

Workspace owners may assign tasks to users who do not belong to any of the project groups. In this scenario, depending on the access settings for the entire workspace, these non-team members may not be able to view the entire workspace. Their view might be limited to the specific task(s) they have been assigned to. For example, a reviewer or an approver of a document may only see that review or approval task and the linked document without being able to access the entire workspace.

It is also possible to include people who don’t have system access. E-mail reviewers who receive information via e-mail depend on another user with access to SAP Ariba Contracts to communicate their responses back into the workspace on their behalf. This is useful when negotiating with the other contract party, who may not have direct system access.

Access Control

In addition to team membership, access controls can be set at the document or workspace level. These access controls enable a project or document owner to refine the control of project team member access to a project or document. Each project or document has associated access control settings. Users who satisfy the access control settings can view the project or document and potentially modify it. Users who do not satisfy the access control settings cannot view the project or document and are unaware that it exists.

The table below lists the options available for access control.

Access Control	Description
Classified	Only members of the following system groups can access the classified project or document: Classified Access global group Contract Manager Internal Contract Manager Sales Contract Manager Sourcing Manager Supplier or Customer Manager Internal Users group
Draft Access Restricted	This setting only affects text files. It determines that a user who has access to the document but is not the document owner or project owner can access only the last published version of the document.
Owner/Administrator Only	Only members of the Project Owner group and users with project owner capabilities can view the project or document.
Private to Internal Users	Only members of the Internal global user group (typically users in your company) can view the workspace or document.
Private to Team Members	Only project team members can view the workspace or document. Note The Active Team Member, Observer Team Member, and Team Member with Limited Access project roles satisfy the requirements for the Private to Team Members access control setting.
Legal Information	Members of the Legal system group can view the workspace or document.
Finance Information	Members of the Finance system group can view the workspace or document.

As discussed, membership in a project group allows users to perform certain tasks at a workspace level, not at a global level. If you want to give a large group of people access to a contract workspace, set the access control rather than adding them as team members. Add people as team members if you have a small group who need to receive notifications and participate in the contract creation and management.

For example, if you set the access control for a document to Owner Only, only the document owner (as opposed to the project owner) can view it in the workspace.

You can set access controls on a document in a contract workspace template so that all contracts created from that template contain that document with those access controls. Essentially, documents can be modified by an individual or a group who owns the document. Members of a non-owner group cannot own a document. To allow members of a non-owner group to edit a document, create a group, and add all the members who need access to make changes to the document. Then, make this new group the owner of the document.

Create a Contract Workspace Team

Business Example

In this exercise, you will learn how to create a team inside a contract workspace.

ExerciseStart Exercise

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