How to start a project

A project is a named body of work inside one team. Creating one takes a name and a department; everything that makes it useful is set afterwards on its Overview. For what a project is for, start at What are projects and campaigns?.

Before you start

Creating projects is usually a lead's job rather than every member's. If Project is absent from the Create menu, that is what it means, and How to work out who can do what in your workspace explains how to check.

Editing a project afterwards is checked in that project's own department, so a lead of Marketing manages Marketing projects. Admins can manage any.

How do you create one?

Create next to your workspace name, then Project. On a department with nothing in it yet, the + Create menu on the empty screen offers the same thing.

The New project dialog asks for a Project name, an optional description, a Department, which is required, and an optional Campaign.

The campaign picker reads No campaign when it is empty, and you can create a campaign from inside it without leaving the dialog.

A project lives in one department. Pick the team that owns the work rather than the team with the most people in it, because that choice decides who can manage it later.

What do you set on the Overview?

Open the project and you land on Overview, which is where the project is actually configured.

Click the big title or the summary line under it to edit them in place. Enter saves and Escape cancels.

The Properties card holds the rest, and each control saves the moment you pick:

• Status: Backlog, Planned, In progress or Done. These belong to the project and are separate from the four task statuses.
• Lead: the person accountable. Any active member of the workspace can be picked, not only the department's roster, which matters when a project is run by somebody outside the team doing the work.
• Start and Target dates, which are what draw the project as a bar on the roadmap.
• Campaign, which you can also create inline from here.

What else is on the Overview?

Three cards that read rather than write.

Milestones lists the project's checkpoints with their dates, undated ones last. Adding and removing them is How to add and reschedule milestones.

Progress shows total scope, how many are complete, a percentage bar, and open-task counts per person with unassigned last. It counts every task in the project plus their sub-tasks, and it is computed rather than typed, so it cannot be wrong.

Activity shows the last eight things that happened in the project.

Below that sits the planning spine, where you lay out what goes out and when. That is How to plan what goes out and when.

How does the team work in it?

The pill tabs at the top switch between Overview, List, Board and Calendar. Those three working views behave exactly as they do on a department, covered in How to work a list, a board and a calendar.

Tasks point at a project. Sub-tasks do not: they belong to their parent task and inherit their place from it.

Why is the Progress card ignoring my cycle filter?

Because progress is the truth about the project, and a filter is a view of it.

The cycle picker in the header narrows the List and Board tabs. Progress keeps counting every task in the project, which is what you want when somebody asks how far along the whole thing is.

Why is everything read-only?

Because managing this project needs rights in its department, and you hold them somewhere else or not at all.

The page still opens and still reads, which is deliberate: seeing a project you cannot edit is usually more useful than a locked door. Ask an admin, or the department's lead, and see How to work out who can do what in your workspace first so you know what to ask for.