Master Projects

A master project is an umbrella for a whole engagement or campaign. It sits above multiple linked sub-projects, giving them a shared client, a shared overall budget, and a single place to see how the work fits together.

A typical campaign might run like this:

• A master campaign opens with a Strategic Brief project.
• The strategic brief’s output feeds a Creative Brief sub-project.
• That spawns Motion Design, Production, and Digital Campaign sub-projects.
• All of them share the same budget and client context, and can declare dependencies on one another.

What a master project holds

Detail	Description
Name & description	The campaign and its strategic overview
Client	The client organisation the work is for
Status	Draft, active, on hold, completed, or archived
Overall budget	The total budget ceiling, in your chosen currency (AUD by default)
Timeline	Start, target completion, and actual completion dates
Owner	The user responsible for the campaign

Sub-projects sit beneath the master project and can themselves be nested, so you can model multi-level campaign structures.

Brief templates

Each sub-project can be driven by a brief template: a Markdown file kept in the client’s brand assets under a Brief Templates collection. There’s no special editor: templates are authored with the standard Markdown editor in Brand Assets.

Client Brand Assets/
├── Brand Strategy/
├── Creative/
├── Reference/
└── Brief Templates/
    ├── strategic_brief.md
    ├── creative_brief.md
    ├── motion_brief.md
    └── production_brief.md

A template captures the standard expectations for a brief in plain language: tasks, timelines, team, and budget.

# Strategic Brief - Example Client

This strategic brief outlines the standard tasks required for a strategic
brief for Example Client. This includes:

- Audience Intent Modelling (1 day)
- 4C's development (0.5 days)
- Proposition (0.5 days)

Assign Alex Chen if available. Otherwise assign Taylor Morgan.

When you create a sub-project you pick a client, then choose one of that client’s templates. The brief refiner agent reads the template alongside the client’s other brand assets and uses its natural-language constraints as guardrails so the brief conforms to them.

Budget rollup

Budgets roll up automatically at two levels:

• Project level: the combined budgets of a project’s sub-projects against its own budget.
• Master level: the combined budgets of every project under the master against the overall budget ceiling.

Spend is tracked against these figures so you can see allocation and actuals across the whole campaign.

Dependencies

Sub-projects can depend on one another, with a dependency type (finish-to-start, finish-to-finish, or start-to-start) and an optional hard-blocking flag. Runnit prevents a project depending on itself and detects circular dependencies.

Working with master projects

The Master Projects area lets you:

• See every master project, filterable by status and client.
• Create a new master project with its client, budget, and timeline. It starts in draft, ready to activate.
• Open a master project’s dashboard with tabs for Hierarchy, Budget, Dependencies, and Settings.

The hierarchy tab shows the master, its projects, and sub-projects as a tree. Each project uses the same rounded-square colour identifier shown elsewhere in Runnit; the budget tab shows allocation and spend with a per-project breakdown.

Adding a sub-project

From the master-project dashboard, choose Add Sub-Project, then choose one of two paths:

• Existing project: select an organisation project that is not already linked to another master project. Confirming links it without changing the project’s brief, tasks, or status.
• New project: enter a name and optional description, client, budget, and dates. Runnit creates a draft project linked to the master project. It inherits the master project’s client and currency when you do not provide them.

The new-project path is manual: it does not run Brief Builder or generate a resource plan. To use the guided flow, create the project through Brief Builder first, then add it through Existing project.

The New project option requires project-create access. Linking and unlinking existing projects requires project-update access.

Edit a master project

Open Settings in the master-project dashboard to update its name, description, client, status, budget, currency, and dates. Users with update access can also choose Edit in the header to jump directly to this tab; other users see the settings read-only.

Organisation-specific name

Your organisation can call master projects Campaigns, Programmes, Initiatives, Engagements, Workstreams, or Project Groups. An administrator chooses the label in Organisation Settings, and Runnit uses it in the navigation and page headings.