Project status is a build artifact.
Charters, requirements, and risk registers live in Git as plain files. Every change is tested and gated before it merges, and the pipeline compiles the documents into status, roadmaps, and dashboards. Nobody types a status anywhere.
It takes the Infrastructure-as-Code / GitOps playbook and points it at the PMO.
The reporting is stale and the reasoning is lost.
Today's PMO runs on PowerPoint, Excel, SharePoint, and email. Nothing is authoritative, and nobody records why decisions were made.
The five defaults.
The right-hand column is not banned. It is the exception, and exceptions get documented.
Read the principles →Declared, then checked.
You author the document; the pipeline checks its fields, sections, and requirement links on every change. Watch it run:
--- kind: charter project: PRJ-001-AUR id: AUR-charter status: approved --- ## Objective Cut onboarding from 14 days to under 2. ## Success Criteria - Onboarding p50 below 48 hours.
The checks decide what counts as done, the same way every time, and the same checks run for real in CI.
Follow the thread: why does this test exist?
The links carry the value. Documents stay thin and richly connected, so any test walks back to the business reason it exists.
Five hops, no slide-hunting. The pipeline generates this walk from the links; it is the same graph behind the traceability matrix. (Aurora is the fictional sample project used in examples across this site; its people are invented. The deployments below are real.)
Every project has a unique ID and its own live page.
Each project carries a stable identity, PRJ-001-AUR, that namespaces its documents (documents/PRJ-001-AUR/) and its items (AUR-BR-001). Nothing collides, and every item says which project it belongs to. The pipeline compiles all of it into a portfolio dashboard with a page per project. Each page opens on a verdict sentence built from that project's recorded causes, then shows its milestones, its risk matrix, and its features charted by dependency order and scope size. Hover any number and a tooltip explains where it came from.
Each RAG is computed from that project's own documents, using coverage, open risks, and failing audits. The panel above shows the format; the live dashboard has today's states. See the live dashboard →
The method is running in public right now.
This site is ordinary hand-written web pages. The pipeline it describes runs in public, in three deployments that regenerate their dashboards and badges from their documents on every push. The meta-portfolio is PMO as Code governing its own development, Refuge for Humans is a real product spec converted from a Word BRD, and Aurora is the reference portfolio of disclosed-fiction samples.
