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The Engineering Planning Framework checklist is the core of the product: a structured set of categories and items that describe what “good” planning looks like for a software project — things like technical design, security review, and rollout planning. Every project tracks its own progress against this checklist, so at any point you can see what’s been done and what’s still missing.

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Why this matters

Without a shared checklist, planning quality depends entirely on who happens to be running the project — some teams write a thorough design doc and rollback plan, others skip straight to building. The framework checklist gives every project the same baseline expectations, so gaps get caught before launch instead of after an incident.

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Structure

The checklist has three levels:
  • Category — a top-level grouping, like “Technical Design” or “Reliability & Operations.”
  • Subcategory — a more specific grouping within a category, like “System Architecture” under “Technical Design.”
  • Item — the actual checklist entry, like “High-level system design completed.”
Some items are marked optional — relevant to some projects but not required for every one.

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Definitions and templates

Many checklist items come with extra help:
  • A definition — a short explanation of what the item actually means and what “done” looks like, so it’s not just a vague label.
  • A template — a ready-to-use artifact (like an ADR template or a rollback plan outline) that a project can start from instead of writing from scratch. The same template can be shared across multiple checklist items.
Not every item has both — some are simple status checks, others come with a full definition and template.

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Customizing the checklist for your organization

The built-in checklist is a starting point, not a fixed list. Your organization can add its own categories, subcategories, items, and templates on top of it. In practice, most organizations manage this custom content through GitHub Sync rather than editing it by hand, so changes go through the same review process as your code.

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Browsing the checklist in the dashboard

The Framework page shows the full checklist as a searchable, expandable list, grouped by category and subcategory. Each item shows whether it’s optional, and whether it has a template and/or a definition available. Clicking an item opens its full definition and template content, with tabs to switch between the two when both are available.

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Using the checklist with an AI assistant

If your team connects an AI coding assistant to the Framework MCP server, the assistant can browse categories and items, read definitions and templates, and help draft artifacts directly — without anyone copying checklist content into a chat window by hand. Every response is filtered to what that person is actually allowed to see, the same as the dashboard — see Permissions & Roles Explained.
  • Project Phases for how checklist categories get prioritized as a project moves through its lifecycle
  • GitHub Sync for managing your own checklist content as version-controlled files
  • Framework MCP Server for connecting an AI assistant to the checklist