What a Work Package is
A Work Package is a chunk of work on a project — a section of the job with its own name, dates, progress, and people. Think of it as a way of carving the overall scope into pieces that can be planned, allocated, and signed off one at a time.
If your project is a school refurbishment, you might have Work Packages for the roof, the M&E first fix, the classroom decoration, and the external works. Each one has its own dates and its own team, but together they make up the whole job.
When to use Work Packages
Reach for Work Packages whenever you need to:
- Break a project down into trade-by-trade or area-by-area sections
- Show a client or QS exactly what's been done and what's left
- Plan who's on site for which days, with which equipment
- Sign off discrete sections as they finish, instead of waiting for the whole job
Sub-packages — where most of the detail lives
Every Work Package can hold a tree of sub-packages underneath it. Sub-packages are the small jobs inside the bigger one — and they're where you'll spend most of your time. Planned dates, required trades, operative allocations, asset allocations, and dependencies all sit on the sub-package, not on the parent.
The parent Work Package's progress bar fills in automatically as you tick off its sub-packages, so you never have to update it by hand.
The four types of Work Package
When you create a Work Package you can pick from four types, depending on what kind of work you're capturing:
- Work Package — the standard container for most jobs
- Task — a single bit of work that doesn't need breaking down further
- Milestone — a zero-duration marker for things like handover dates, sign-offs, and key deliveries
- Phase — a higher-level grouping that holds related Work Packages together
You can change the type later if you change your mind. Kanban view can group the board by type, which is handy when you want to see milestones, phases, and tasks side by side.
The status workflow
Every Work Package has a status that tells everyone where it sits in the workflow. You change it from the Status dropdown in the header on the detail page.
Backlog— not yet ready to startReady— planned but no one assigned yetAllocated— operatives assigned and ready to goIn Progress— work is underwayBlocked— paused because of a dependency or issueComplete— work finished, ready for sign-off
When the status reaches Complete or Review, the Sign Off button appears in the sidebar so you can capture a final record of how the work finished up.
The four ways to look at the list
The Work Package list comes in four flavours. Pick whichever one suits the job in front of you using the view toggle in the top-right — your browser remembers your last choice.
- Table — best when you want to filter, sort, and run actions on lots of Work Packages at once
- Kanban — best for moving work along by dragging cards between columns
- Gantt — best for planning dates and seeing how the timeline fits together
- Split — best for browsing through several Work Packages quickly with a preview panel on the right
If you find yourself applying the same filters every day, save the view and reload it with one click later.
Project view vs company-wide view
Work Packages turn up in two places in Project Commander:
- Inside a project — go to the project's sidebar and click Site Commander > Work Packages. You'll see only that project's Work Packages, and the Bulk Create button is available for spinning up many at once from a template.
- Company-wide — open Work Packages from the main sidebar to see everything across the business. Use the Project filter to drill into one job, or leave it on All Projects to see the whole portfolio.
Switch between the two depending on whether you're focused on one job or stepping back to see the bigger picture.
Next steps
- Creating Work Packages — to add a new Work Package by hand or from the Gantt.
- Sub-packages — to build out the tree of smaller jobs underneath.
- Scheduling and rescheduling — to plan dates and reshuffle when things move.
- Allocating operatives — to assign the people who'll do the work.