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Getting started

This page takes you from an empty organisation to a plan you can review: create a project, find your way around its tabs, and make your first edits.

Create a project

On your organisation's projects page, choose Create Project. Organisation admins can create projects, up to your plan's limit. Setting one up takes five short steps, and you can change everything later in the project's Settings.

  1. Template: start from a template or a Blank project. Hover over a template to see what it covers.
  2. Overview: give the project a title.
  3. Timing & Effort: choose Relative timing (durations) to plan phases and activities in weeks, or Specific dates to use start and end dates. Set the effort multiplier and its unit, which the Health Check uses to spot roles with more work than they can carry.
  4. Team Members: add people from your organisation as an Author, who can edit the plan, or a Reviewer, who can view it and comment during a review. You can skip this and add people later.
  5. Public Link: optionally turn on a link that lets anyone view the plan without signing in, with or without a password.

Choose Create Project to finish. You'll land on the project's Overview.

Templates

A template gives you a complete example plan for a type of project: an introduction and scope, phases and milestones with their criteria, the organisation's parties and roles, work packages, activities with RACI and effort, products and governance. Templates are grouped as Engineering (aerospace, automotive, Australian and UK rail, grid-scale battery storage, nuclear construction), General (a simple four-phase project) and Software (agile and waterfall).

The template is applied in the background. While it's being set up, a notice at the top of the project says so. It usually takes a few seconds.

Use a template as a starting point and adapt it: rename, delete and add to it until it describes your project (see Templates). A blank project starts with nothing, which suits you best if you already know your structure.

Find your way around

Each project has five main tabs along the top. Most have a row of sub-tabs beneath them.

Tab What it's for
Overview The project's introduction and scope, its progress and health, plus the Roadmap, Lifecycle and Attachments
Organisation The parties and roles involved, as an org chart, and a guide for each role
Activities The work: its structure, flow, responsibilities, effort and tools
Products What the project produces, and what's affected when a product changes
Planner A board for tracking the work as it happens

See Project tabs for what each tab and sub-tab shows.

The project name at the top opens the project menu, with Settings, Team Members, Comments, Exports and Health Check, and lets you switch between projects. Search (or ⌘K, Ctrl+K on Windows) jumps to any tab.

Make your first edits

Tabs open read-only. Choose Edit in a tab's toolbar (or press E) to make changes, and Done when you've finished. Everything saves as you go, so there's no Save button (see How saving works).

The Overview's Project progress card suggests what to do next: add people, then activities and products, then connect them together. For a blank project, a good order is:

  1. Phases: on Lifecycle, choose Add Phase for each stage of the project, then Add Milestone for the points it must reach.
  2. People: on Organisation, choose Add Party to add your groups and the roles within them.
  3. Work packages: on Activities, choose Add Work Package. Every activity belongs to a work package, so you need at least one.
  4. Activities: add activities to a work package, give each one a phase, and assign roles with their RACI responsibility and hours.
  5. Products: on Products, choose Add Product, then open it and add the activity that produces it under Produced By.

Then choose Open Health Check on the Overview. It lists anything missing or inconsistent, often with a fix you can apply in one click (see Health Check).

Next steps