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Engineering Framework organizes everything around a simple three-level structure: Organizations contain Departments, and both Organizations and Departments can own Projects. Access follows this same structure, so a permission granted higher up automatically applies to everything beneath it.

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The hierarchy

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Organization

Your company or team, as a whole. Every person, department, and project belongs to exactly one organization. An organization also holds its own settings:
  • Role templates — reusable bundles of permissions you can hand out to people (see Roles Management)
  • Project phases — the lifecycle stages your projects move through (see Project Phases)
  • Custom checklist content — your own categories, items, and templates on top of the built-in framework checklist, typically managed through GitHub Sync

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Department

A sub-unit of your organization — a team, a business unit, whatever grouping makes sense for you. Departments help you organize people and projects without needing a separate organization for every team. Not everyone needs to belong to a department; it’s optional. Deleting a department doesn’t delete the people in it — they simply become unassigned to any department.

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Project

The actual unit of work. A project belongs to one organization and, optionally, one department. Every project also has:
  • Members — who’s involved, and in what role (e.g. tech lead, product manager, SRE)
  • A checklist status — how far along the project is against each applicable framework checklist item
  • A current phase — see Project Phases
  • An optional connection to a code repository, if you want planning artifacts linked to where the actual work happens

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How permissions cascade

Access in Engineering Framework flows downhill: if you’re granted administrative access at the organization level, you automatically have that same access over every department and project underneath it — you don’t need to be granted access separately at each level.
  • Department access follows from organization access. An org admin can manage every department without being added to each one individually.
  • Project access works the same way. An org admin can view, edit, and manage every project in the organization without being added as a member of each one.
In other words: granting someone admin access on the organization is enough for them to administer everything underneath it. More targeted access — like adding one person to a single project — is granted directly on that project instead. For the full breakdown of what each role can actually do, see Permissions & Roles Explained.