Seeding a programme

This is for the administrator who has just finished setting up an instance , licence in, email working, first baseline created, and is now looking at a product with nothing in it. This is the order that actually works, written so you don’t have to discover it by trial and error.

If your instance is licensed for Assess (Assure or Enterprise), you don’t need this page by hand, go to Home and follow “Set up your programme”: a separate, separately-resumable wizard walks the same order below for you, and remembers where you left off. This page is what a Deliver-edition instance links to instead, since the only always-available step on that edition (people) isn’t worth a wizard of its own, see the note at the bottom for why.

Why order matters

A few things in OTB Works can only be created once something else already exists: you cannot assign a step to someone who isn’t a person yet, and you cannot cost a work package against a day rate nobody has set. Doing these in the wrong order mostly just means retracing your steps, but it’s easier to do it once, in this order:

1. The people your plan will name.
2. A framework, if your edition includes Assess.
3. Nothing to configure for benefit categories: but read this section anyway, because the obvious next step (creating one) doesn’t exist.
4. The default day rate, on Admin, Settings.
5. Handing off to Decide and Deliver, where the ongoing work happens.

1. Create the people your plan will name

Before you triage a finding, scope a work package, or invite a contributor to an assessment, that person needs to exist in OTB Works, as a person (someone the plan can name as an owner, assignee or customer), a login (someone who can sign in), or both. Go to Admin → People and access and read that page in full before you start: it explains the difference, and the rule that every login must be linked to a person.

A note on job titles. If you think of the person running this programme as a “programme manager”, OTB Works doesn’t have a role by that name. The closest fit is Delivery Lead: read the role descriptions on the People and access page and pick whichever actually matches what that person will do, rather than assuming the title translates directly. There is no separate role for this.

2. Pick a framework, if your edition includes it

Framework-based assessment (Assess) is part of the Assure and Enterprise editions, not Deliver. If your instance is licensed for it, go to Assess → Start an assessment, pick a framework, name the assessment, and invite whoever will contribute. If your licence doesn’t include Assess, this step doesn’t apply to you, the product won’t show you a locked or greyed-out version of it, because there’s nothing to unlock; the section simply isn’t there. See Licensing if you’re not sure which edition you’re on.

3. Benefit categories, nothing to create

If you’re looking for a screen to add your own benefit category, it doesn’t exist, and it isn’t a gap: this is a closed, permanent list of six , cost avoidance, efficiency, revenue enablement, quality, risk reduction, compliance. Every benefit you record against the programme is filed under one of these six, always. There is no administration screen for this because there is nothing to administer.

4. The default day rate

Costing a work package needs a day rate. Set the default day rate on Admin, Settings; it is used when a person has none of their own. Set it after people exist and before anything downstream needs a cost. Nothing else in this guide depends on it.

5. Hand off to Decide and Deliver

Once your people exist and (if licensed) a framework assessment is under way, there’s nothing further to “seed”, Assess produces findings as contributors score the assessment, and from there:

• Decide → Triage is where a finding becomes a decision: accept the risk, or turn it into plan work.
• Deliver → Plan is where the actual programme structure, workstreams, work packages, deliverables, steps, gets built, one item at a time, by whoever owns that part of the plan.

Neither of these is a one-off setup step, so this guide stops here deliberately rather than inventing a “seed your plan” screen for stages that don’t have static configuration the way Assess and People do.

Why this is a guide, on this edition

An instance with an Assure or Enterprise licence has a wizard on Home that walks the order above and remembers where you left off. An edition with no Assess module is linked straight to this page instead, since “create your team” is not worth a wizard on its own. If you are reading this from a Deliver-edition Home page, carry on with the order above by hand.