The data model, in 90 seconds

Every persona guide eventually explains this, so here it is once, short enough to link to instead of re-narrating.

The one fact

TruePPM has one table for work items (Task). A phase, a deliverable, a sprint story, and a milestone are all rows in that same table — not separate objects synced between a “schedule” tool and a “board” tool.

A work package is a task with a duration and CPM dependencies: the PM’s Gantt bars. A story is the same kind of row, with a sprint foreign key and a story_points field added, and a parent pointing at the work package it decomposes: the Scrum Master’s board cards. Story points roll up to the parent work package automatically, because they’re the same row’s children — not a second system reporting in.

What follows from that

• No sync, because there’s nothing to sync. A contributor drags a card to Done; the row’s status changes; the PM’s Gantt reads the updated row on its next render. There is no export, no webhook, no reconciliation job between “the board” and “the schedule” — there’s one row, and two views of it.
• Velocity feeds the forecast directly. When a sprint closes, the completed story points roll up to their parent work packages, and TruePPM computes a revised CPM duration suggestion from measured velocity — the PM reviews and applies it, non-destructively. Automatic reforecast on sprint close shipped in 0.3.
• An epic is a work package too. The epic/story hierarchy the Product Owner sees and the WBS the PM sees are the same tree, viewed from either end.

Go deeper

• The Story — the same idea, walked through as an eight-step narrative across a real program
• Unified data model — the full field-by-field technical reference