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For PMO Directors

You run a program office. You need visibility across the work, capacity you can plan against, and a compliance story you can defend — and you evaluate tools professionally, so you want the line drawn honestly. Here it is up front: the community edition is built for the program level — one or more related projects run by a team. Portfolio governance across many programs is the enterprise edition, by design.

That split is deliberate, not a gap. TruePPM’s whole model is adoption-first: a program gets fully productive on the open-source core, and the organization adds the enterprise layer for portfolio coordination, org-wide identity governance, and compliance evidence when it needs to govern across programs. This guide covers what the core gives you today, and exactly where enterprise begins.

A program groups related projects under one team. The program view rolls up KPIs, cadence, and a shared risk policy across its projects, so a program manager sees the whole effort in one place — not one project at a time. This is the staging ground beneath a portfolio: real cross-project coordination, within a single program.

→ See Programs and Program rollup settings

Every consequential change — membership edits, role changes, settings updates, lifecycle actions — is recorded in a workspace audit log that Owners and Admins can read. It answers “who changed what, and when” for day-to-day operations.

Be precise about what this is and isn’t: it is an operational log for running the workspace. The immutable, compliance-grade audit trail with retention guarantees and SOC 2 evidence export is an enterprise capability. If your hard requirement is tamper-evident audit for an auditor, that’s the enterprise line.

→ See Audit log

TruePPM enforces a five-role model (Owner / Admin / Scheduler / Member / Viewer) on every project, at the engine level — not just hidden in the UI. People see and change only what their role allows. This is the access-control foundation. Basic OIDC/OAuth single sign-on against your own identity provider lands in the community core in 0.4; the org identity-governance layer — SAML 2.0 federation, SCIM provisioning, LDAP/AD directory sync, and enforced org-wide SSO — sits on top of it in the enterprise edition.

→ See RBAC and Sharing & access

The core runs entirely on your infrastructure — PostgreSQL, Valkey, and a Helm chart for Kubernetes. No data leaves your network, which is the foundation of any residency or regulatory story. (The compliance evidence layer on top — immutable audit, approval workflows — is enterprise.)

→ See Deployment and Security

Confidence-weighted forecasts you can repeat upward

Section titled “Confidence-weighted forecasts you can repeat upward”

Each project carries a Monte Carlo forecast — P50 / P80 / P95 — instead of a single optimistic date. When the CEO asks “will this deliver by Q4?”, the answer is a probability, not a guess. That’s the same number your PMs commit on, so the story is consistent from team to board.

→ See Scheduler engine — Monte Carlo

Run these steps in order — they start from a machine with nothing running.

  1. Start the stack and load both data sets. From your TruePPM checkout (if you have not installed yet, start with Installation):

    Terminal window
    make up
    docker compose exec api python manage.py seed_demo_project --with-personas
    docker compose exec api python manage.py load_sample_project --with-personas # Atlas

    You need both: the demo seed gives you the two-project multi-team view and the persona roles, and Atlas is the only bundled data set that contains an actual program — three related projects under one lead, which is what steps 4 and 5 are about. Each command prints its persona logins and shared password when it finishes. On a local Docker stack (DEBUG=True) that password is demo; anywhere else it is $TRUEPPM_DEMO_PASSWORD if you set it, otherwise a random token printed once — copy it before you clear the terminal.

  2. Sign in as the PMO director. Open http://localhost:5173 and sign in as diana — Diana Khan, seeded with the Admin role, which is what makes step 6 reachable.

  3. Open the multi-team sprints lens. In the left navigation rail, under Deliver, click Sprints (/projects/:id/sprints), then flip the [ This project | My Teams ] toggle in the breadcrumb row to My Teams. It aggregates the active sprints across projects into one view — day-of-sprint, remaining points, capacity, trend, and forecast, sorted most-behind first. This is program-level visibility without opening each project.

  4. Open the program view. Sign in as atlas-alex (the Atlas program lead) and use the top-bar location switcher to select the Atlas Platform Launch program rather than a project inside it. Open its Overview (/programs/:id/overview) — the rollup across its three projects, the cross-project picture a program manager works from.

  5. Follow the cross-project critical path. Click Schedule in the same rail (/programs/:id/schedule). Platform Core gates Migration, which gates the public-launch milestone — one critical path running straight through three project boundaries.

  6. Open the audit log at Settings → Audit log, back on the diana account. Confirm that operational changes are recorded with who and when. This step needs Admin or Owner — it is why the walkthrough uses diana rather than raj.

Then judge it against your real bar. Your top criteria — a one-glance portfolio dashboard across 40 projects, enforced org-wide SSO with directory sync, and a tamper-evident audit trail — are enterprise, and intentionally not in this repo. The honest question for the community edition is narrower: does a single program run cleanly on the open core, so adoption can start before the portfolio layer is bought?

Where the line is: community vs. enterprise

Section titled “Where the line is: community vs. enterprise”
CapabilityEditionWhy
Program-level rollup (related projects, one team)CommunityCross-project coordination within one program
Operational audit log (who changed what)CommunityDay-to-day workspace operations
Five-role RBAC, self-hostedCommunityAccess-control and residency foundation
Per-project confidence forecasts (P50/P80/P95)CommunityThe number you repeat to the board
Basic single sign-on (OIDC/OAuth via your own IdP)CommunityLogin federation a self-hoster expects (lands 0.4)
Portfolio dashboard & health scoresEnterpriseVisibility across many programs
Org identity governance (SAML 2.0, SCIM, LDAP/AD sync, enforced SSO)EnterpriseDirectory-driven provisioning and enforced org-wide SSO
Immutable audit trail, SOC 2 evidence exportEnterpriseTamper-evident compliance, not operations
Cross-program resource leveling & heat mapEnterpriseCapacity across programs
Demand intake & prioritization workspaceEnterprisePortfolio investment governance
  • Installation — stand up an instance, or send this to whoever will
  • Evaluation guide — the Atlas sample, a three-project program at scale
  • Programs — the program entity and its rollup
  • RBAC and the Audit log — the governance surface available today
  • Roadmap — the enterprise portfolio layer and when it lands