Kanban & Gantt

The Projects page offers three ways to look at your work: a Grid, a Kanban board, and a Gantt timeline. It opens on the Kanban board. Switch between them with the view toggle, and your choice is remembered the next time you return.

Kanban boards

The Kanban view shows your projects in columns. Every organisation starts with a default board called All projects. You can add more boards for different ways of working: a sales pipeline, a delivery board, or a board for one client.

Boards show projects only. A brief that is still being written or planned lives in New Briefs and the automation queue; the moment planning creates its draft project, that project appears on the board.

Drag a card to another column to move the project. The change applies straight away.
Click any card to open its detail view.
The board scrolls horizontally, staying usable on smaller screens.
If your organisation has more than one board, pick one with the Board selector next to the view toggle. Runnit remembers your choice.

Creating projects from a board

Creating a project while you’re looking at a board keeps it on that board:

The create dialog shows a Starts in choice listing the board’s planning columns (for example Enquiry, on Sales Pipeline), pre-set to the first one.
Planning columns also have a + button in their header that creates a project directly in that column.
After creating, you stay on the board: the new card appears highlighted in its column with a message offering Open project.

Only planning-stage (draft) columns can be chosen as a starting point. A project can’t be born straight into an active, done, or cancelled column; drag it there when the time comes, so the usual activation checks run. On a client-scoped board the new project’s client is set to that board’s client automatically. Creating a project from anywhere else (for example the dashboard) works as before and starts in Planning.

Direct creation needs project creation access and the organisation’s direct project creation setting; organisations that use the Brief Builder flow are unaffected.

Stages and columns

Every project sits in exactly one workflow stage (for example Draft, Active, or a custom stage such as Qualified). Each board column shows one or more stages, and the same project can appear on several boards at once when they each map its current stage. Stages a board does not map simply don’t show there, which is how the default board keeps completed and cancelled work out of the way.

Each stage belongs to a fixed category: draft, active, on hold, done, or cancelled. The category controls what happens when a project moves:

Moving a draft project into an active-category stage activates it, runs the same budget and rate card checks as the Activate project action, and confirms its tentative schedules.
Moving a project back into a draft-category stage makes its schedules tentative again.
Moving a draft project straight to a done or cancelled stage leaves its tentative schedules unchanged.
Moving a project into a done or cancelled stage while it still has incomplete tasks opens a confirmation where you choose what happens to those tasks. Cancelling the dialog snaps the card back.

Archived projects

Archived projects never appear in board columns. Use the Show archived toggle under the filters on the Projects page to list them in a separate archived section, where anyone with the archive permission can unarchive them. Dragging a card onto a stage whose status is archived archives the project (archive permission required, and only done, completed, or cancelled projects qualify); archived projects are read only until unarchived. See Project Management for the full archiving workflow.

The default board

The default board keeps the familiar columns:

Column	Shows
Planning	Draft projects.
In Progress	Active projects.
Internal Review	Projects in internal review.
Client Review	Projects in client review.
Done	Projects marked done.

When Brief Builder finishes AI-assisted planning, the generated project appears in Planning as a draft until someone reviews its tentative schedule and activates it.

Managing boards and stages

Users with kanban management access see Manage board and New board in the Kanban view. Manage board opens an editor laid out like the board itself: its columns side by side, each stage shown as a card you can drag, and a Not on this board tray for stages the board doesn’t show.

From the Columns tab you can:

Drag stages between columns, into a column from the tray, or back to the tray to hide them. Every drag action is also available from the stage’s menu.
Rename columns, reorder them with the arrows, and add or remove them.
When a column holds several stages, pick the target stage that dropped cards move to.

From the Workflow stages tab you can:

Rename stages and add custom stages. A stage’s lifecycle state is chosen once and cannot change later, because it controls activation checks and schedule bookings.
Open a stage’s Options to choose how its projects open. Full workspace shows the complete project (timeline, team, brief, files). Lean opportunity shows a focused view for pipeline work: the details form, files, and history, without delivery tabs. Lean stages can also set a Promote to stage, which puts a “Mark as …” button on those opportunities; leave it empty for dead-end stages such as Lost.
Delete a custom stage. You choose another stage to receive its projects first, so nothing is orphaned.

From the Cards tab you can choose what each project card on this board shows. A live preview card updates as you tick fields on or off and reorder them with the arrows. You can show project fields (client, target date, created date, budget, description preview) and, when the board has a details form, that form’s fields, so an enquiry card can show its summary, source, or contact directly on the board. Fields marked with a lock are hidden from people without financial access.

From the Table tab you can choose which columns the project task table opens with for projects on this board. Use organisation default follows the organisation setting; Customise columns lets you tick columns on or off and reorder them, with a live preview of the resulting header row. Financial columns only appear for people with financial access, and each person’s own saved layout and saved views still take precedence. The default board always follows the organisation setting, which you change in the organisation settings.

A board can also set a Details form in the header of the editor: a published record form that every project created through the board carries automatically. See Record forms for how to build one.

A board can also be deleted from the editor. The default board cannot be deleted.

Creating a board

New board opens a short three-step wizard.

Step 1: Template. Name the board and choose a starting point:

Client delivery: Planning, In Progress, Internal Review, Client Review, and Done, using the built-in stages.
Sales pipeline: Enquiry, Qualified, Proposal, Won, and Lost. Any of these stages your organisation doesn’t have yet are created with the right behaviour: the funnel stages are draft (tentative schedules) and open as lean opportunities with a “Mark as Won” button, Won is active (winning activates the project and unfolds the full workspace), and Lost is cancelled.
Simple: To do, Doing, and Done.
Start from scratch opens the full editor to build columns and stages yourself.

The wizard tells you which stages it will create, and warns you when a template stage already exists in a different group (the existing stage is used as-is).

Step 2: Cards. Decide what the cards on this board are:

Full projects: every card gets the full workspace, with the timeline, tasks, team, and brief.
Form-only records: lightweight cards that open as a details form. Use this for boards that track requests, applicants, or registers rather than delivery work. Any card can be expanded to a full project later with Show full workspace.

The Sales pipeline template fixes this choice: enquiries always open as lean opportunities, and winning one unfolds the full workspace.

Below the card choice, pick the Details form that projects created through the board carry automatically. Each template suggests a starter form: Enquiry details for the sales pipeline (summary, source, contact, estimated budget, and desired kickoff) or Project details for the others (summary, objective, budget, start date, target completion, and stakeholder contact). The starter is created for your organisation the first time you use it, and you can edit it afterwards in Studio. You can also pick any published record form you already have, or No form. A read-only preview under the picker shows the selected form’s fields before you commit, with a reminder that the form stays editable after the board is created. See Record forms for how forms work.

Step 3: Sharing. Choose who sees the board, then select Create board. Everything is created in one step and the new board opens immediately. You can fine-tune it any time with Manage board, including the New cards open as setting that controls whether cards created through the board start as full projects or lean records.

A board can be visible to the whole organisation or scoped to a single client. Client-scoped boards show only that client’s projects, and users restricted to other clients don’t see them at all.

Limit a board to specific people and groups

Use Limit to specific people and groups (in the New board dialog and in Manage board) to give a board an audience: for example, a New Business pipeline that spans many clients but only the New Business group sees, or delivery boards only the production team sees. One search box finds both user groups and individual people; add them as chips, and remove the last chip to open the board to everyone again. Group chips show the member count, and everyone in a listed group sees the board. Boards with an audience show limited next to their name in the Board selector.

Three things to know:

People with the kanban management permission (managers and administrators by default) always see every board, so they can administer boards they are not listed on.
A board audience organises navigation, not data access. The projects on a limited board stay visible to anyone who can already see them in the Grid, in search, or on other boards. To control who can see a client’s projects at all, use client access restrictions.
The default board is shared by the whole organisation and can’t be limited.

People who are removed from the organisation drop off board audiences and groups automatically; if they rejoin later, someone has to add them again. If everyone listed on a limited board has left (or a listed group is empty or archived), the board stays limited (only kanban managers see it), and Manage board offers to add people or groups, or remove the limit.

In the full editor, stages you add on the Workflow stages tab appear in the tray straight away with a New badge, so you can drag them into columns before saving; the stages and the board save together when you select Create board or Save changes. A stage name cleared to empty is restored when you leave the field (built-in stages can be renamed but never deleted), and closing the editor with unsaved changes asks you to confirm.

Gantt timeline

The Gantt view plots one bar per brief or project on a timeline, using the same styling as the timeline on the project detail page. Click any bar to jump straight to that item’s detail view.