Work management

Projects, work items, boards, a backlog that spans every project, and sprints that know who is on leave.

Issue tracking with one difference that shapes everything else: the cadence belongs to the organisation, not to a project. An agency or a product company runs one rhythm across many clients or many products, and this is built for that rather than for one team on one codebase.

The pieces

Project: A body of work with its own key and colour. Client work, a product, an internal stream. See Projects.
Work item: One thing to do, with a key like ERG-142. Epics, stories, tasks, bugs, spikes and subtasks. See Work items.
Workflow state: Where an item is. States are defined once for the organisation, so an item means the same thing on every board. See Boards and workflow.
Board: A view of work in columns. Scrum or kanban, scoped to the organisation, a project or a team.
Backlog: One ordered list across every project. See The backlog.
Sprint: A dated window of committed work, with capacity computed from the HR record. See Sprints and capacity.
Initiative: Work that crosses projects — a migration touching four clients, a quarter's theme. See Initiatives.
Release or milestone: A dated bucket of work with a moment it shipped or was reached. See Releases and milestones.

A cadence is never per project

A sprint collects work from any project, and a project board is its cadence's board with one filter applied. That unified order is what makes it possible to answer *what are we actually doing next* — a question a per-project backlog cannot answer at all.

By default there is one cadence for the whole organisation. An organisation with teams can give a team its own: see Cadences.

Where to go next

Setting it up: Setting up work management — the four decisions that shape everything else, and the ones to leave until you need them.
Arriving from Jira: Coming from Jira — what maps directly, what is called something else, and the habits worth unlearning.
Finding your way about: Getting around — search as a jump, the URL as the state, and the addresses worth knowing.
Something surprised you: Why did that happen? — the refusals and the automatic changes, collected in one place.
Organising people around it: Teams group people and can own projects; the org chart draws the reporting lines that decide who approves what.
Closing a sprint: Sprint close and carry-over — what happens to work that did not finish.

Where it meets HR

Sprint capacity is scheduled hours minus public holidays minus approved leave, per person, resolved as of the sprint's start date. That query is the reason both halves are one product: a commitment made without knowing two people are away is a commitment made on a number that was never true, and no integration between two separate systems makes that lookup reliable.

What is not built yet

Read this before planning around it

Time recorded here is priced and invoiced, and a billing run locks the hours it puts on a document. What a contract says an hour is worth — a retainer, block hours, a cap — is answered in contracts and allowances. Work item creation is from the board and the backlog; a client never sends a rank, because the server owns what a drop means. See what is not built for the rest.