Add Projects to your Objectives

A Project in Cascade is a group of tasks or actions executed to achieve the desired outcome. Projects come in handy when you're looking at breaking down large pieces of work to small, executionable actions. These are nested below the objectives and contribute to the health of that objective, and thereby to the plan! These projects can have actions that can be assigned to different owners. For example, if your objective is "Lead to shift towards an electrical and autonomous mobility", the project can be "Research and onboard", and the actions underneath this can be "Hire best-in class talent", "Research for AI advancements", "Form a core team", "Implement technological advancements in electric mobility", and so on.

Technically, Projects are time-bound investment of business resources (funding, people, materials, etc.) to achieve a given outcome. They're key vehicles for organizations to execute on strategic pieces of work that deliver large-scale or business-critical transformation and change.

Some more common examples are:

• Research and development to drive product or service innovation
• Optimization of existing products or services
• Process change or re-engineering
• System or program implementation

From the Objective sidebar, click Add projects. The Add projects sidebar opens. Or, you can add a project inline from the Planner page, and then add further context from the Edit project sidebar.

• Name your Project something that specifies how you want the objective to be assessed.
• Set a Start date and End date, which will set a timeline for your project. Remember that the dates cannot exceed the range of the parent objective!
• Add further context about the project in Description to provide more narrative with rich text, bullets, embedded links and videos.
• From the Collaborator area, you can add or manage collaborators, who will be able to work on the project.
• Contributes to area will show the plan and the objective your project belongs to. You can edit this by clicking on the text - you can either move them under a different objective of the same plan, or under an objective of a different plan. Remember that it will list only those objectives that fall within the date range of the parent objective.

When you save the Project, you’ll have a progress bar that tracks the progress and health of the project. This depends on the actions nested under the projects. You can add an action either inline or from the projects' sidebar! Every time the progress of those actions are updated, the progress and the health of the project gets automatically updated. You can add an objectives table in a report to pull information on the health of projects in an objective!

FAQs

How do I interpret the data from Projects?

While the goal hub of a project gives you a quick view of its performance over time, you can build some custom charts (line, bar, pie) for projects and effectively manage its performance, and take guided actions on prioritization! See Custom Charts: Project Analytics for details. 

You can also pull up a report with an objectives table which can be drilled down to look at the projects, its progress, data populated against its custom fields, risks associated with it, and so on.

Can actions exist independently of projects?

Yes - there is now the option to create actions that contribute directly to objectives, or to create a project and break it down into one or more actions.

Can I add measures or contributing objectives to projects?

Not right now! Projects are purely a way to break down the execution aspect of work.

Can projects be shared across plans/teams?

Not right now! Projects can only exist on one plan, linked to a specific objective. However, owners and collaborators from any team can be assigned to a given project. Based on the current permissions model, these users will be able to update the project as long as they have permissions to update the plan. 

I want to use more advanced project management capabilities, is that on the roadmap?

Yes! Some of the value-add features being considered include:

• Dependencies
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Resource allocation and optimization

Can I add custom fields to projects?

Yes! Once defined, you can apply that template to the projects in a plan! You can then populate data against these fields and include in the objectives table in Reports!

How to delete projects?

Click the three dots against the project, either from the Planner or the Sidebar to delete it. Once you delete the projects, the actions underneath it will also get deleted!

Can I give an alias to project?

Yes, if you're an admin, you can customize the name of projects from the Admin > Strategy model.

I'm looking at much more project management capabilities like change management, cost benefit analysis, etc.!

At this point, you can:

• add risks and mitigation plans, 
• create custom fields, and populate data against them,
• build insights with dashboards and reports,
• view timelines (Gantt charts), 
• integrate with project management tools like Jira, ClickUp, etc., 
• add milestones and checklists to track your tasks and manage projects. 

We'll also be introducing relationships to enable you to define dependencies, blockers to manage projects more effectively. However, detailed project management capabilities like the ones you asked for, schedule variances, predictive forecasting, building S-curves, etc. are not supported now! 

If you want this feature, you can suggest it - Go to your profile initials/profile picture > General > What's new, and click Feature Requests tab. Click Suggest a feature, and fill in the details!