Work management
Cadences
One rhythm for the organisation, or a rhythm per team — and how a project chooses.
The default is one cadence for the whole organisation: a single backlog, and sprints that collect work from any project. For an agency running one rhythm across many clients, that is the point of the product.
An organisation large enough to have teams usually has more than one real rhythm — a platform team on fortnightly cycles and a delivery team on weekly ones, both correct. So a project can be owned by a team, and its work then follows that team’s sprints and sits in that team’s backlog. A project with no team follows the organisation.
Cadence belongs to the project, not the item
It is not something set on a work item. If it were, two items in one project could end up in different sprints and the project’s own board would stop meaning anything. Hand the project to a team, and all its work moves with it.
What that enforces
- Work can only join a sprint of its own cadence. Otherwise a team sprint quietly fills with work from projects the team does not own, and its capacity — computed from the team’s members — stops matching what it contains.
- A reorder must name a neighbour from the same backlog. Two backlogs never appear in one list, so a position computed between them means nothing in either.
- A sprint holding work cannot be moved to another cadence. It would end up holding work from projects that cadence does not own — the same rule arrived at from the other side.
Handing a project to a team
Changing who owns a project changes which cadence its work follows, so its items may sit in sprints that will no longer be theirs. Three cases, each a different kind of fact:
| Where the work is | What happens |
|---|---|
| A closed sprint | Left exactly as it is. What a team committed to and delivered last March did happen. |
| A running sprint | The move is refused. Pulling work out mid-sprint changes what the team said they would deliver, after they said it. |
| A planned sprint | Released back to the backlog. Nothing has been committed. |
Seeing one cadence
The board and backlog carry a picker: the organisation, or any team that owns projects. The organisation sits among the teams rather than above them, because a team’s backlog and the organisation’s are the same kind of thing — presenting one as a parent would suggest work flows between them, which is exactly what the rules refuse.
A project links to its own board and backlog. That is the same view with one filter applied, not a separate container — which is why the two can never disagree, and why filtering to a project also selects its cadence.