Creating projects

The guided project setup - scope it to real assets, set its phase and team, and understand what closeout does to the linked registry.

Projects → New opens a guided creator that front-loads the decisions that matter. Ten deliberate minutes here saves the mid-project scramble to reconstruct what the project was actually for.

1. Identity

Name, description, project type, and the planned window (start/end). Use names your council or board will recognize - these flow into reports.

Attach what the project touches:

Scope drives four things: project costs post against the linked records' history, the dashboard can slice spend by building and system, the Capital Brief counts the project's budget as Committed funding (split across the linked system classes and infrastructure networks), and closeout can update the linked assets (see below).

3. Workspace

Organizations running both Facilities and Infrastructure file each project under one of them, so the Projects list on each side stays the estate it belongs to.

The Workspace column and filter on the Projects page only appear for members who see both workspaces - there is nothing to choose between otherwise. The filter is a Facilities / Infrastructure / Shared switch at the top of the page. The list opens on Shared, which shows everything; Facilities or Infrastructure shows that workspace's records plus the shared ones. Organizations not running Infrastructure never see any of this.

4. Phase

Set the project's current phase - design, procurement, construction, closeout, or your own structure. Phase options are editable categories (Settings → Categories), and the phase is a single field you advance as the project moves; the fine grain of scheduling lives in tasks.

Each phase also carries a Means setting - active, on hold, complete, or cancelled - which is how the rest of the app reads your phase names:

Name your phases whatever your organization calls them; set Means once per phase and the reporting follows.

5. Team

Add team members and their project roles - project manager, site lead, finance contact. Team membership is what routes updates and puts the project on people's dashboards.

6. Budget skeleton

Set the approved budget now, even as one number - creating a project with a budget auto-seeds a single "Headline budget" line, and the full breakdown can come after tender. A project with no budget reports 0% spent forever, which helps nobody.

Document folders

Each project gets a document area. Folder templates let your organization stamp a standard structure - 01 Approvals, 02 Design, 03 Tender, 04 Construction, 05 Closeout - onto a project so filing stays predictable across PMs. Pick a template at creation; templates themselves are managed from a project's Documents tab.

The Assets tab

Once linked, each asset in scope gets a per-asset action - repair, replace, or good - with an estimated cost, so the project records not just which assets it touches but what it intends for each. Select multiple assets to assign an action in bulk, and generate work orders straight from the selection to hand the physical work to the crew.

The Infrastructure tab

Infrastructure-enabled projects get the same working list for linear assets. The tab has three views: Features, Routes and Corridors.

Features is where the work is planned. Each feature in scope gets an action - repair, replace or good - and an estimated cost. Replace starts from the feature's current replacement value, priced through the same rate chain the rest of the Infrastructure module uses, and you can overwrite it; repair takes whatever cost you enter. Totals for repair, replace and the whole estimate sit under the list. Select features to set an action in bulk, and Create Work Orders makes one work order per selected feature that has a repair or replace action, carrying its cost and notes. Staff and above can edit.

Routes and Corridors are the quick way to scope a street. Adding a route adds its segments to the Features list; adding a corridor adds the segments of every route in it. Features already in scope are left as they are. Each view then lists the routes or corridors the project touches, with how much of each is covered - "12 of 30 features" when the project takes only part of a route. Removing one takes its features off the Features list, together with any action, cost and notes entered for them. Features stay the unit of scope, so these views always agree with the Features list rather than tracking a separate link.

What closeout does - read before you use it

When you move a project into a phase whose Means is complete, a dialog offers to update the linked registry. It follows the setting, not the name, so you can call that phase Closeout, Handover, or Substantial Completion.

If the project executed a lifecycle strategy event, you get that event's own prompt instead: it names the event, proposes the condition the event models, and for rehabilitation work offers to record a betterment with the project's actual cost. Everything is editable and skippable.

Otherwise you get three choices:

Used deliberately, this is the loop closing: the renewal project completes, the assets it renewed read as new, and the next lifecycle forecast starts from reality.

After creation