Project Fields

Type, Level, Category, and your own fields — classify projects so leadership can see where the effort is going.

What They Are

Every project carries three built-in fields — Type, Level, and Category — plus up to three more that your organization defines. Each field holds one option per project, and every field is optional.

Fields answer the question every leadership team eventually asks: "where is our improvement effort actually going?" Slice the program any way your company already talks about it — by plant, by value stream, by funding source — and the whole program becomes filterable and reportable along that axis: which projects, which ideas, and how much opportunity sits in each bucket.

Managing Your Fields

Owners and Admins manage fields at Settings, Projects — one card per field, built-ins first. Add up to three fields of your own, and give any field up to 20 options. Rename or recolor options whenever you like. Each field also takes a one-line description, shown to the people setting it so they know what you meant by it.

The built-ins can't be deleted. Type and Level options are plain text; Category options and the options on fields you add carry a color, which is what shows on tiles and chips.

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

Setting Fields on a Project

There are three moments to set a project's fields: when creating a project (step 3 of the wizard), anytime afterward in the Classification row on the Charter, and when activating an idea. Category used to live on Project Settings; it now sits on the Charter with Type and Level, so everything that classifies a project is in one place. Every field is optional — a project with nothing set simply shows no chip.

Project Leaders, and anyone else with full access to a project, can set its fields, so keeping the program classified doesn't bottleneck on Admins.

Where They Show

Project tiles show Category and any added-field values in the label row (Type and Level stay off the tile), and the project header shows every set field as a chip. Projects, the Program view, Project Ideas, and Reports each get a filter row with one select per field — Type, Level, Category, and each field you added, by name.

Filters stack: pick a Type and a Category and you see projects that match both. Your active picks show as removable chips with a count, every field offers a Not set choice for finding what hasn't been classified yet, 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.

Reports by Field

Reports carries one Projects by card per field — Type, Level, Category, and each field you added. Opening a card takes you to the full by-field report: one row per option with its project count, idea count, and money — Total COPQ, Hard savings, Soft savings, Total costs, and Net hard savings. A Not set row comes last, so work without a value stays visible instead of vanishing from the totals; it disappears when there's nothing in it.

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 Option per Field

A project carries exactly one option per field, and that's a deliberate design decision — it's what makes each by-field 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 — and if you find yourself wanting both, that's usually a sign the second one belongs in a field of its own.

For how COPQ itself works — what it measures and how benefits are read against it — see Financials & COPQ.