Projects

Projects

A project is work that:

• Spans weeks or months
• Has multiple distinct phases / milestones
• Involves multiple people, possibly across teams
• Needs scheduling and dependency tracking

Examples a trust might run as a project:

• Year-end IT refresh (5 academies, 800 devices)
• Cabling + AV upgrade in a new build
• Migrating from one VLE to another
• Rolling out a new MIS
• Termly audit + remediation programme

A change is a single, scheduled action. A project is a programme of work.

What’s in a project

The project page is a single scrollable view with named sections:

• Project header — reference, name, status badge, lead, sponsor, window, and progress bar
• Linked changes — changes raised under this project
• Timeline — Gantt-style bar chart of milestones (only shown when milestones exist)
• Updates — team status posts with a green/amber/red mood indicator
• Milestones & tasks — the milestone tree with tasks nested under each
• Discussion — internal team chat thread
• Plan — scope, success criteria, and implementation notes
• Team — project members and their roles
• RAID register — Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies (tabbed within the section)
• Activity — full audit trail of changes to the project

Milestones + tasks

Milestones are dated checkpoints (e.g. “All academies surveyed”); tasks are the work items under them with assignees + due dates.

Milestones with both start_date and target_date show as bars on the Gantt view. Without a start_date they show as single-day diamonds (a “due by” rather than “happening between”).

Tasks have due-dates only — they roll up under their milestone.

Updates and health

Post a status update whenever something meaningful changes. Each update can carry a mood indicator:

• Green — on track, no significant blockers
• Amber — at risk; usually a slipping dependency or a resourcing issue
• Red — will not deliver as planned without intervention

The mood is set per update post, not as a single project-level field. The latest mood posted gives the team a quick read on health. Don’t mark green just because nothing’s burning today; mark green only if you’re confident about the next four weeks.

Linking work

When you raise a change request, you can attach it to a project — the project page then shows a “Linked changes” panel with every change raised under it. This is the primary way to join the project’s scheduled implementation steps to its CAB approval trail.

The RAID register (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) within the project tracks project-level risk items. These are distinct from the governance risk register — they live on the project and feed into the project’s own audit trail.

Closing a project

Move the project to Completed when the deliverables land. After a post-project review (a longer version of the change PIR — what went well, what didn’t, what we’d do differently), move it to Archived to retire it from the active list.

Skipping the review robs the next project of the lessons.