Departments and Locations: Organizing Work by Function and Place
What departments and locations are in a BackOps organization, how they connect to events, crew, and the org schedule, and where each one is managed.
Departments and locations are the two ways an organization groups its work outside any single event: departments by function (audio, lighting, video, logistics, accounting) and locations by place (an office, a warehouse, a venue you run shows in). They let a department lead see their team's load across every show, and let anyone open a venue and see what is booked there.
Why Departments and Locations Matter
A production company's work is split across events, but its people think in departments and its gear and shows sit in places. Without a way to group by either, a lighting lead has to open every event to find the tasks that belong to their team, and nobody can answer "what do we have at the warehouse next week" without a spreadsheet.
How They Work
Departments are a simple named list. The link to event work is made on the event side: when a collaborator on an event is given a department, that collaborator's tasks and their crew's activities roll up to the department. A department also has its own org-level tasks, schedule, and files.
Locations are records with a type and attributes, much like crew or collaborator records. An event points at one location, crew can be assigned to locations, and a location opens to its events, crew, schedule, and files.
flowchart LR
D["Department"] -->|"given to"| C["Event collaborator"]
C --> T["Tasks and activities roll up to the department"]
L["Location"] -->|"chosen in event settings"| E["Event"]
L -->|"assigned"| CR["Crew"]Both appear on the organization Schedule, whose sidebar has calendar groups for General (you, the organization, and Events), plus Departments and Locations once the organization has any, each toggled on or off. Departments and Locations are in the Records group of the organization sidebar.