Projects

The Projects studio is your workstreams board — the initiatives you're driving, with status, owners, progress and briefs in one place. It's a lightweight TPM surface: you don't file tickets, you talk about the work, and the board keeps a live read on what's on track, what's slipping, and who's carrying it. Every non-trivial change re-computes each project's health so the picture is always current.

What it is#

A project is a lane on the board that gathers the dated work belonging to one initiative — its tasks, its delivery target, its risks, and a computed health. The studio's job is to turn a scatter of deadlines and updates into a coherent status you can report up, without the ceremony of a full project-management tool. It's a TPM surface: targets, risks, status lines, briefs and a portfolio roll-up, all driven from conversation.

How projects appear#

Projects arrive two ways. You can declare one — "the Wiz rollout is its own project" — and it lands on the board immediately as a lane, even with no items yet. Or the team recognises a coherent, multi-step initiative with deadlines and proposes it. Proposed projects are suggested until you act: confirm one to lock it (so re-synthesis leaves it alone) or dismiss it if it isn't really one initiative, which frees its items and stops them being re-proposed.

Items, tasks & targets#

A project holds the dated work that makes it up:

• Tasks — a specific deliverable pinned to the project, with its own deadline, so it lands on the timeline. ("Add a task to write the migration doc by Friday.")
• Items — existing dated notes moved onto the project (as opposed to creating a new task).
• A delivery target — the date the whole initiative is committed to, distinct from any single task's deadline.

Because a task's deadline and the project's target are different things, "create project X with a task to do Y by tomorrow" sets Y's deadline as a task and leaves the project's overall target for you to commit separately.

Status & RAG health#

Every project carries a computed health — a traffic-light status with a score and the reasons behind it, so "amber" always comes with why:

The status re-computes on every meaningful change, and you can also set a narrative status line in your own words to sit alongside it. That combination — a computed light plus a human sentence — is what makes the board reportable without being noisy.

Risks (RAID)#

You can log a RAID-style risk against a project, with a severity of high, medium or low. Severity matters: a high risk flips the project off-track (red), so the roll-up surfaces it immediately. As risks close you resolve or drop them, and the health recovers accordingly — so the board reflects real exposure, not a stale register nobody updates.

Single-project brief#

Ask for a brief on one project and you get a single-project status digest — where it stands, its target, open risks and recent movement — with a paste-ready Markdown narrative you can drop straight into an update. It's the "give me the one-pager on the ledger migration" answer.

Portfolio report#

Zoom out and the board produces a portfolio report across everything you're tracking: the red/amber/green roll-up, the at-risk list (ranked worst-first), upcoming deadlines, every open risk, and per-person load — who's carrying how much. It's the leadership read: what needs attention this week, and where the pressure is.

Linked staffing plans#

A project and a staffing Gantt are two views of the same work, and they link both ways. Turn a project into a plan and Zimac drafts one row per person and a block per dated item; turn a plan into a project and each work-stream's end-of-week becomes a completion milestone. Once linked they stay in sync — push a project's edited dates back onto its plan — so the roadmap and the delivery board never drift apart.

Organizing the board#

You keep the board tidy from chat: rename a project, merge two that are really one initiative, and add or remove items as work moves between lanes. Confirming locks a lane against re-synthesis; dismissing frees it. Everything you're told is done reflects the live board — the studio reports the real state after each change, never an intention.