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Setting up work management
The four decisions that shape everything else, and the ones you can safely leave until later.
Getting started covers the HR half and Work management is the tour. This is the setup, and it is deliberately short: a new organisation can create a project and start tracking work immediately, because everything below already has a working default.
You do not have to do any of this first
A new organisation arrives with a set of workflow states, a set of work item types and a default board. Skip straight to creating a project if you want to see the product work before configuring it — none of the settings below are needed to track your first item, and all of them can be changed afterwards.
The order that matters
- 1
Decide whether you have teams
If one group of people runs one rhythm, do nothing — the organisation has a single cadence and every project follows it. If several teams run their own sprints, create the teams first, because a project is handed to a team and inherits its cadence from that. See Cadences.
- 2
Create your projects
One per body of work: a client engagement, a product, an internal stream. The key is worth thirty seconds of thought — it prefixes every item forever and does not follow a rename. See Projects.
- 3
Check the workflow states
The names are yours. What the product reasons about is each state's category — not started, in progress, done — and that is what decides whether an item counts as finished, whether a release can ship, and where a burndown line goes. Rename freely; change a category deliberately. See Boards and states.
- 4
Check the work item types
Also yours, with a level that decides what can contain what. Higher levels contain lower ones, and the only rule is that a parent must not sit below its child. See Work items.
What to leave until you need it
| Feature | Leave it until |
|---|---|
| Labels | Somebody asks for one. They are free to add and free to delete, so there is nothing to plan. |
| Custom fields | You know what question you are asking. A field's key and type are fixed once it holds values, so this is the one worth getting right rather than fast. |
| Boards | The default board stops matching how you work. A board is a grouping of states for display and changes nothing about the work. |
| Initiatives and releases | You have work spanning several projects, or a version to ship into. |
| Automation | You have caught yourself doing the same thing by hand three times. |
| Saved views | You have typed the same filters twice. |
Where HR meets it
Sprint capacity is scheduled hours minus public holidays minus approved leave, per person. That means it needs working patterns and, ideally, holiday calendars — without them a sprint still works, it simply reports no capacity rather than a number that was never true.
The same figures drive the burndown's ideal line and the workload report. None of it is required to track work; all of it makes planning honest.