Work management
Initiatives
A container for work that belongs together and does not belong to one project.
An initiative gathers work that crosses projects: a platform migration touching four clients, a compliance deadline, a quarter's theme. Every item still belongs to its own project — the initiative is the thing that spans them.
Called an initiative, not a module
*Module* already means a product area here — HR, work management, service desk — and two meanings of one word is a bug waiting for somebody to read the wrong one. Linear calls this an Initiative and Plane calls it a Module; both stop at the project boundary, which is precisely the boundary this product does not have.
One initiative per item
An item belongs to at most one. The first question anybody asks of an initiative is how far along it is, and an item counted under two makes every progress figure ambiguous — the roll-up double counts and the two answers disagree. Adding an item that is already in another is refused, so moving it is a deliberate act done from the initiative that holds it.
Progress is reported twice, always
Count and points give different answers
Nine small items done with one large one left is 90% by count and perhaps 40% by effort. Showing either alone is what convinces a stakeholder the work is nearly finished when it is not — so both bars are shown. Where items carry no estimate, that is said rather than folded into the arithmetic: a missing estimate is never counted as zero, or an initiative reads as complete the moment its one estimated item finishes.
Which projects it spans is derived
Nothing records the projects an initiative touches — it is computed from the items in it. A stored list would eventually disagree with the work, and there is no useful version of that disagreement.
Health is a judgement, not a calculation
Progress can be derived; whether something is on track cannot. A computed health that contradicts the person running the work is worse than none — they stop trusting the figure and stop updating anything. So health is stated by the lead, shown next to the arithmetic rather than derived from it, and anything other than *on track* requires a reason: a colour with no explanation is not something anybody can act on.
Two states nobody has to remember
- Past its date with work left is reported as such, however the stored status reads. A status column will happily go on calling an initiative active for months.
- Every item done but nobody closed it is the ordinary end of every initiative, and is surfaced with the button to close it. Nothing closes one by itself — that is a decision.
Deleting one releases the work
The items stay; only the grouping goes. That is the opposite of deleting a project, which takes its items with it — and the screen says so, because the two look alike.