Waterfall day one — build your own plan

Ships in 0.4

This walkthrough uses the redesigned Start sheet, in-app baseline capture, and the project status date field — all 0.4. On 0.3.0-alpha.3 the project creation screen is an older multi-step wizard, baselines exist over the REST API only, and the status date has no in-app field yet (Monte Carlo uses today’s date instead). Everything else here — build mode, dependencies, Monte Carlo, PDF export — is unchanged from 0.3.

Quickstart gets you a seeded program in five minutes. This page is the other half: building a project from nothing, in the UI, the way a PM running a real waterfall plan actually would. No API calls, no seed command — just the screens you’d use on day one with your own work.

By the end you will have a project with a phased WBS, milestones, dependencies, a captured baseline, a status date, a Monte Carlo forecast, and a PDF you could hand to a stakeholder.

Before you start

You need a running TruePPM instance (Installation) and an account with at least the Project Manager (Admin) project role — you get this automatically on any project you create, since creating a project makes you its Owner.

1. Create the project

Open the sidebar and click New project (or + New project from the Projects directory). The Start sheet is one screen, no step navigation:

1. Choose Blank — the other two options, Template and Import, are for starting from a preset or an existing file; a from-scratch plan wants Blank.
2. Leave Program as None — standalone project unless you already have a program to attach this to (see Programs if you do).
3. Enter a name and a start date.
4. The sheet states the project’s methodology as a read-only line, derived from the program or workspace default. If that line does not already say Waterfall, open Project settings → General right after creation and set it there — see Project methodology preset.
5. Confirm the working calendar in the sheet’s footer (inherited default, or override it now) — it governs every date the schedule computes from here on.
6. Click Create.

You land on the new project’s Schedule view — empty, with a live row already holding the cursor.

2. Build the WBS: phases, tasks, milestones

The Schedule view’s build mode is the fastest way to lay down a plan’s structure with the keyboard. It needs no setup.

1. Type a task name and press Enter — this creates a new row each time.
2. To make a row a phase, type the phases first, then indent the tasks under them with Alt + → (⌥ + → on macOS). An indented row’s parent automatically becomes a phase (a summary row rolled up from its children).
3. To mark a row as a milestone — a zero-duration gate rather than a task with a duration — press ⌘ M / Ctrl + M to insert one directly, or hover an existing row and click its ◆ control to convert it. A milestone cannot hold work, so convert only a row with nothing scheduled under it.
4. Set each task’s duration inline — click the Duration cell and type a value (5, or 2w for two working weeks).
5. Press ? at any point to open the full build-mode shortcut cheatsheet.

A plan for a small waterfall project might look like:

Foundation (phase)
  Site survey — 3d
  Permits — 10d
  Excavation — 5d
  ◆ Foundation complete (milestone)
Construction (phase)
  Framing — 15d
  Rough-in (electrical/plumbing) — 12d
  ◆ Structure complete (milestone)
Finishing (phase)
  Interior finishes — 20d
  Final inspection — 2d
  ◆ Project complete (milestone)

3. Wire dependencies

Dates do not yet reflect real sequencing until tasks are linked. For each task that depends on another:

1. Hover the task’s row — hovering reveals its dependency chain (predecessors highlight blue, successors highlight green) so you can see what is already linked before adding more.
2. Right-click the row and choose Add dependency — this opens a task picker.
3. Pick the predecessor task. The link defaults to Finish-to-Start; with the new link focused, press ⌥ → (Alt + →) to cycle its type — FS → SS → FF → SF — if your plan needs a different dependency type or you need to add lag.

Link “Foundation complete” as a milestone that only fires once excavation finishes, link “Framing” to start after “Foundation complete,” and so on down the plan. Once every task has its real predecessors, the Schedule view computes the critical path automatically — no separate “recalculate” step.

4. Capture a baseline

A baseline freezes today’s planned dates so you can measure drift later — the snapshot you show a stakeholder alongside “here is where we actually are.”

Open the Schedule toolbar’s Project actions (···) menu and choose Capture baseline. A short confirmation explains what a baseline is; confirm it. The snapshot is named automatically (Baseline 1) and becomes the active baseline. See Baselines for what gets captured, and for capturing a second baseline later without losing the first (every baseline stays in the project’s history).

5. Set the status date

The status date is the “as of” date your forecasts compute from — without it, Monte Carlo and CPM both default to today, which is fine for an actively-tracked plan but wrong for a report you want reproducible on a specific date.

Open Project settings → General and set Status date (data date). Leave it blank to keep defaulting to today, or pin an explicit date for a frozen report. See Progress-aware forecasting for how this anchors both the deterministic schedule and the Monte Carlo pass.

6. Run Monte Carlo and read the forecast

Three-point estimates (optimistic / most likely / pessimistic) turn the deterministic CPM date into a probability distribution. Click a task row, open its drawer’s Details tab, and fill in the Estimates section for at least your critical-path tasks — a task with no three-point estimate falls back to its single duration.

Then expand the Forecast & sensitivity bar docked at the bottom of the Schedule view and run a simulation from the Monte Carlo row. Read the P50 / P80 / P95 chips, and press Details › for the full distribution and the sensitivity tornado — which tasks are actually driving the finish date, not just which ones look uncertain. See Monte Carlo for the full mechanics.

7. Export a PDF

From the Schedule toolbar, choose Export PDF (in the toolbar by default; if the window is narrow it moves into the ··· overflow menu — see Schedule Toolbar). The export matches what you currently see: hide the dependency lines first if you want a cleaner handoff copy.

What you have now

A real project — your own WBS, your own dependencies, a critical path the engine computed rather than one you eyeballed, a captured baseline to measure drift against, a status date your forecasts anchor to, and a PDF you could put in front of a stakeholder today. Nothing above touched the API.

Change history has a retention window

Every edit above — durations, dates, dependency changes — is recorded in the task’s change history, but those rows are purged nightly after HISTORY_RETENTION_DAYS (default 90 days). A waterfall project commonly runs longer than that. If you need the full edit trail to survive the life of the project — for an audit, a claim, or a post-mortem — raise the retention window before you rely on it; see Outbox & Record Retention to tune or disable the purge.

Related

• Schedule Build Mode — the full keyboard reference
• Baselines — what a baseline captures, and how rebaselining works
• Monte Carlo — the simulation mechanics and progress-aware forecasting
• Schedule Toolbar — every toolbar control, including Export PDF
• Change History — what’s tracked, and the retention window
• Quickstart — the seeded-sample path, if you want to see a finished example first