#Projects & Tasks

Projects & Tasks is where you plan and track work in OCTO Ops — as projects made up of tasks, or as standalone tasks that don't belong to any project.

#How it fits together

• A project is a container for related work. It has a state, a health, an owner, a list of members and the tasks that belong to it.
• A task is a single piece of work. Every task either belongs to a project, or stands on its own as a "free" task — a personal to-do, or a small piece of work shared directly with other people.
• A project team is a named group of people and departments you can share a project or task with in one step, instead of choosing people one at a time.

#Who can see a project or task

Every project, and every task, carries one of three visibility settings, chosen by whoever creates it:

A task that belongs to a project normally follows the project's own visibility rather than setting its own. It only gets a separate, wider visibility when someone deliberately shares that one task beyond its project.

#Access, in plain words

Three things decide what you see and can do here, and all three apply together:

• Permission groups. In an organization that uses permission groups, Projects & Tasks has six permissions: Projects, All Tasks and Project Teams (each View all or own, Create, Edit, Delete), and My Work, Board and Calendar (View). With View (own) you see the projects you created or own, the tasks you created or are assigned to, and the project teams you created or own. All Tasks decides which tasks you see everywhere, including My Work, the Board, the Calendar and this module's overview. Commenting, reacting, logging time and every other change to a task need All Tasks › Edit. Owners and Admins have every permission, and in an organization without active permission groups every member keeps full access.
• Your organization role decides what you can do in the module at all — whether you can create projects and tasks, comment, and log time. Owners and Admins can do everything the module offers, Managers and Members have a smaller fixed set of abilities, and Customers and Guests have no access to this module. In an organization that uses permission groups, some of these abilities come from your groups instead — see Special permissions.
• Your role on a specific project — Owner, Manager, Editor, Commenter or Viewer — decides what you can do on that project once you can already see it: create or edit its tasks, comment, and manage its members and sections. A project's Owner and Managers have the most control; a Viewer can, depending on the project, be limited to just looking.

An ordinary permission never gives you more than your organization role and your project role allow: with Projects › Edit you still can't edit a project you only view. Special permissions are different: they stand in for your organization role, and four of them work whatever your role on the project. A screen or change your permissions don't cover shows the 403 — You don't have permission page. A task linked to the one you're reading (a subtask, dependency or relationship) that your permissions don't let you see appears as a locked Restricted task row with no link.

#Special permissions

Some abilities go beyond viewing, creating and editing. In an organization without permission groups they come with your organization role: Owners have all of them, Admins all but Set cost rates, and Managers have Archive projects, Change who can see projects, Assign tasks, Change who can see a task, Correct or delete other people's time entries and Create project teams. Members have none.

In an organization that uses permission groups, Owners and Admins keep them as above. Everyone else gets them only from their groups, as special permissions in the matrix. A Manager whose groups don't tick one doesn't have it, and a Member whose group ticks one does.

A special permission works only together with the ordinary permission for that screen, on a project or task you can see. For example, archiving still needs Projects › Edit on that project. Most special permissions also depend on your role on the project:

• Archive, Delete or restore and Change who can see a project, and See or Set cost rates, need you to be a Manager on the project (or, for cost rates, its Owner). A project's Owner can archive, delete, restore and change the visibility of it without any special permission.
• Assign tasks to people on a project's task needs a project role that can assign: Owner or Manager, or Editor where the project allows it.
• Change who can see a task on a project's task needs you to be the project's Owner, or a Manager on it who also has Change who can see projects.

Four work whatever your role on the project, as they do for Admins: Edit any project, Edit any task (which also lets you archive a task), Delete any task, and other people's comments and Correct or delete other people's time entries. For example, a Viewer on a project who has Edit any task can edit and archive that project's tasks. Create project teams isn't about projects at all: it depends on whether you own or manage the team.

#What you can do

• See your own work in one place — what's due today, overdue, upcoming, assigned to you, or that you're following. See My Work.
• Create and manage projects, watch their progress and health, and see who's on the team. See Projects.
• Create, find and work through tasks — as a list, a drag-and-drop board, a calendar, or a timeline — and open one to update its status, log time, comment and more. See All Tasks.
• Group people and departments into a project team so you can share work with them in one step. See Project Teams.

#Current limitations

• There's no Inbox, Workload view, Portfolios or Dashboards for this module. Notifications about your work go to the shared notification bell and inbox used across OCTO Ops — see Preferences for how to control what you're notified about.
• You can start a new project from an existing template, but there's no screen to create or manage templates.
• There's no admin screen for this module's workflows, statuses, priorities or notification defaults.
• Milestone, risk, issue and approval are offered as task types, but nothing beyond the generic type label is shown for them — there are no type-specific fields, and no approvals workflow.
• Projects have no budget or custom-fields screens.
• Assigning a task to someone, adding watchers or collaborators, and using checklists or tags all exist in the data behind a task, but no current screen lets you set or change them.
• Deleting or restoring a task has no control anywhere in the application.