> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.engineeringframework.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Getting Started

> Your first steps in Engineering Framework

This page gets you from a new login to a working setup: an organization,
your team, and your first project.

## 1. Log in

Go to your organization's Engineering Framework URL and log in. If this is
the very first time anyone from your company has logged in, you'll be taken
straight into a short setup wizard to create your organization — see
[Creating your first Organization](/creating-your-first-organization).

## 2. Understand what you're looking at

Before you start clicking around, it's worth knowing the shape of the
product — see [Core Concepts](/core-concepts) for the two-minute version:
your company is an **organization**, which can be split into **departments**,
and all of your work lives inside **projects**.

## 3. Set up your planning checklist

Every project is measured against a shared **checklist** of what good
planning looks like — things like technical design, security review, and
rollout planning. Skim [The Framework Checklist](/framework-checklist) to see
what's tracked out of the box, and whether you want to customize it for your
team.

If your projects move through stages (like Discovery → Design → Delivery),
[Project Phases](/project-phases) let you decide which checklist items matter
most at each stage, so people aren't shown irrelevant items too early.

## 4. Invite your team and set permissions

Add the people on your team and decide who should be able to manage
projects and roles versus who just needs to view and work within them. See
[Permissions & Roles Explained](/permissions-explained).

## 5. Connect your AI coding assistant (optional)

If your team uses an AI coding assistant like Claude Code, you can connect it
directly to your planning checklist and Knowledge Base — so it can check
what's missing on a project, pull a template, or search past decisions
without anyone copy-pasting into a chat window. See
[Framework MCP Server](/framework-mcp-server) to get started.

## Self-hosting

Engineering Framework is open source. If you're technical and want to run
your own instance instead of using a hosted one, see the
[repository README](https://github.com/engineering-framework) for setup
instructions.