Project Categories

Classify projects and ideas so leadership can see where the effort is going.

What It Is

A category is an optional, organization-defined label on a project — one per project. Categories answer the question every leadership team eventually asks: "where is our improvement effort actually going?" Tag projects by the kind of problem they attack, and the whole program becomes filterable and reportable along that axis — which projects, which ideas, and how much opportunity sits in each bucket.

Defining Your Categories

Owners and Admins manage the category list at Settings, Projects. Every organization starts with four: Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost — a starting point, not a limit. Rename them, recolor them, delete them, or add your own, up to 20.

Renaming a category updates every project wearing it — no re-tagging. And a category that's in use can't be deleted until its projects are reassigned, so nothing silently loses its label.

Setting a Project's Category

There are three moments to set a category: when creating a project (step 3 of the wizard), anytime afterward in Project Settings, and when activating an idea. It's always optional — an uncategorized project simply shows a dash.

Project Leaders can set their own project's category, so keeping the program classified doesn't bottleneck on Admins.

Filtering by Category

Categories appear as colored chips on Projects, the Program view, and Project Ideas — plus a chip in the project header. Each of those pages gets one-click category filter pills, and every number on the page follows the filter, not just the list. On the Program view that means the stat cards and drill-downs recalculate too — filter to Safety and you're looking at the Safety program, totals and all.

The Program by Category Report

The Program by Category report shows one row per category with its project count, idea count, and money: Total COPQ and Total costs, with Hard savings, Soft savings, and Net hard savings added in full-accounting organizations. Uncategorized appears as its own row, so unclassified work stays visible instead of vanishing from the totals.

Each row drills down one level into the projects behind the number. The audience is the same as the Program view: Owners, Admins, and Executives see the whole organization, and Managers see it scoped to their groups.

One Category per Project

A project carries exactly one category, and that's a deliberate design decision — it's what makes the by-category report sum to the true program total. If a project could carry three categories, its COPQ would be counted three times, and the report wouldn't add up. A project that's genuinely two things gets the one it's most.

For how COPQ itself works — what it measures and how it behaves in each financial model — see Financials & COPQ.