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Projects

Work plans in 30, 45, 60, and 90-day horizons — what your team intends to do, who owns each piece, and what came of it.

Projects is the planning layer that lets an engagement idea become a real engagement event without leaving CommonGage. It is deliberately not a general-purpose project manager: there are no task dependencies, no sub-items, no Gantt chart, and no critical path. The design principle is workflow alignment, not platform replacement — it matches the 30/45/60/90-day work-plan format teams already keep in spreadsheets, and connects it to the engagement record you already have.

What it tracks​

  • Plans — a title, an owner, a horizon, and a scope (organization-wide, a zone, or a site). The target date is derived from the start date and the horizon, so nobody types it.
  • Items — the individual pieces of work a plan is made of. Each carries an assignee, an optional due date, and a status (not started, in progress, done, cancelled). An item with no date is legitimate: not every intention is scheduled.
  • The link to a real event — when a planned item becomes an actual event on the calendar, the item records which event it became. That link is what turns "we said we would" into "we did".
  • An optional link to a measure — when Goals & Measures is enabled, a plan can be attached to the number it exists to move, so progress on the plan and movement on the number sit side by side.

Plan health — on track, at risk, off track, not started — is derived, never typed. It comes from the plan's own items against its own schedule, so no one is asked to self-report a status.

What it reports​

  • Plans — every plan in your reach, with its health, completion, target date, and linked measure.
  • My work — the plans you own and every item assigned to you across every plan, soonest first.
  • The plan report (organization administrators only) — plan health across the organization, broken down by scope and by assignee, plus how many planned items became real events.

Projects also publishes four measures to Goals & Measures, so plan activity can be tracked as a target like any other number: active plans, plan item completion rate, overdue plan items, and planned items realized.

Who uses it​

Projects serves two audiences through one place in the navigation.

  • A supervisor — typically an organization administrator — lands on the plan roll-up: which plans are slipping, who is carrying what, and what has actually happened.
  • Someone doing the work lands on My work: their own plans and their own assigned items. They can update the status of anything assigned to them without needing broader permissions, which is the point — the person doing the work is the person who knows where it stands.

Zone coordinators create and manage plans within their own zone. Participants and partner contacts do not see this module at all: it is an internal planning surface.

Why it matters​

A work plan kept in a spreadsheet is disconnected from the record of what happened. The plan says a school visit was intended in October; the calendar says an event occurred in October; nothing joins them, so nobody can answer "did we do what we planned?" without doing it by hand.

Projects closes that gap in one step. A planned item points at the event it became, so the question answers itself — and the same link makes "planned items realized" a number you can put a target on.

Two things Projects deliberately does not do:

  • It never sends a reminder. Everyone in this module logs into CommonGage for other reasons, so due and overdue work surfaces where they already are rather than in their inbox.
  • It never ranks people against each other. Assignee workload appears only inside the administrator's report. There is no leaderboard, and no one sees themselves compared to their peers.