What Crosdesk is

Crosdesk tracks work across several departments that share projects. It is built around five ideas. Everything else in this manual is a consequence of one of them.

1. A department decides who sees what

Every task and every project belongs to one or more departments, and you see the work of the departments you are in. There is no global view and no "all tasks" page, because in an organisation where three departments share a transport hub, a list of everything is a list nobody reads.

This is not a security afterthought. It is the main organising idea, and it is why your Tasks page opens on one department rather than on everything.

See Departments and people.

2. A task is the unit, and it lives in one place

A task has one department, one assignee, one estimate, one status. It can appear on a project canvas, in a sprint, under an epic and on a feature step — but it is the same task throughout, not a copy. Change its status on the board and the canvas agrees, because there is nothing to agree with.

3. A plan is computed, not typed

You do not type dates onto tasks and hope they add up. You shape the work on a canvas — which task follows which — give each one an estimate in working days, and press Verify. Crosdesk lays the dates out from a start date, routing around weekends and holidays.

That means a plan can be wrong in ways Crosdesk can detect: a task with no estimate, a card connected to nothing, a cycle. Verify names each one rather than producing a plausible-looking plan built on a gap.

See Projects and the canvas.

4. Commitment and reality are kept apart

A sprint is a commitment. What actually happened is recorded separately, and the two are never merged:

• Work that arrives mid-sprint goes in Unplanned work, beside the sprint rather than inside it, so the commitment still reads as one thing and velocity still means what it says.
• Ending a sprint takes a snapshot. Later edits to a task do not rewrite what the finished sprint reports.
• The original dates a project promised are kept, so Baseline variance can compare them against where the work actually landed.

This is why several reports exist that look similar at a glance. They are answering commitment questions and reality questions, and conflating them is how a team stops trusting both.

5. Absence is a state

Crosdesk avoids flags that somebody has to maintain. A task is "not yet released" because no release carries it — not because a released checkbox is false. A step is "not started" because nothing before it is approved.

The practical effect: lists stay correct without anybody tidying them, and "what has not shipped yet" is always answerable.

What Crosdesk is not

• It is not a wiki. Documents are specs and notes in a department's folder, with saved and released versions; there is no page tree and no editing together in real time. A long-form knowledge base still lives wherever your team keeps it.
• It is not a time tracker. Estimates are in working days, and nothing asks you to log hours.
• It is not a chat tool. Comments exist on tasks and feature steps, scoped to the thing being discussed.