11 · How a company maps its work onto this

What you will have done: worked out where each layer of your company’s planning lives, from the year down to the week, and what to do about the one layer that has no home here yet.

The shape most companies already have

Almost every company plans on four timescales, whatever they call them. Three of them fit Projects directly.

    flowchart TD
  Y["A year<br/>where the company is going"] -->|"NOT IN NEUTRON YET"| Q
  Q["A quarter<br/>a plan per big decision"] -->|"signed off"| E["Phases become epics"]
  E --> I["Items"]
  I --> S["A week<br/>a sprint delivers some of them"]
  I --> M["Fixed dates<br/>milestones on the timeline"]
  S --> R["What actually happened<br/>the board, the history, the comments"]
  

Year: where the company is going

This does not live in Neutron. There is no place to write an objective, no place to put a number against it, and nothing that rolls work up to one.

Keep the year somewhere else for now: a page in your wiki, a document, a spreadsheet. Then link that page from the plans it produced, which is exactly what a plan’s links are for. The connection between the year and the work is a link a person maintains.

Quarter: one plan per decision

A quarter is a handful of decisions, not a list of tasks. Write one plan per decision. Move the warehouse to Unit 7 is a plan. Get better at fulfilment is not.

Each plan carries a summary of what changes and why now, links out to wherever the thinking lives, and a small number of phases. Getting it accepted is a conversation with a person, on the record. Signing it off turns the phases into epics on the board.

That is the join between deciding and doing, and it is the one place where a decision produces work automatically rather than somebody transcribing it.

Phases become epics

An epic is a phase of a plan: a chunk large enough that other work hangs under it, small enough to finish. Three to five per plan is normal. The Epics screen shows how much of each is done.

An epic asks for review before it closes, unless you turn that off. Closing an epic is a claim that a phase is finished, and that is worth a second person’s eyes.

Week: a sprint delivers some of it

A sprint is the week. Pull work from the epics into the week, run it, close it, and decide where the leftovers go. Closing a sprint is the moment somebody is forced to look at what did not happen, which is the only reason the ceremony is worth anything.

Fixed dates: milestones

Dates the business is committed to are milestones, not items. “Keys to Unit 7.” “Catalogue at the printer.” They sit in their own strip on the timeline above everything, so a busy quarter cannot push a deadline out of sight.

Where the record ends up

Everything that happened is on the cards: who moved what, who approved what, what was said and by whom. That is the point of having one tracker rather than a tracker and a chat log and somebody’s memory.

Reports turns some of that into numbers: what is still open through each day of the running sprint against the size it started at, how many items reached Done in each of the last twelve weeks, how long a card takes from picked up to finished, and how long a review waits before somebody decides it. It counts what the cards already say, so it is only as honest as the board is.

A worked example

Meridian Supply’s year, quarter and week.

The join from the year to everything under it is one link on each plan, kept by a person. That is the honest state of it today.

What can go wrong

Confirm it worked: a person who has never seen your company can open one project and answer three questions from the screen: what are we doing, when is it due, and who is deciding it.