Cycles

Project → Cycles. A cycle is a start date, an end date and the tasks that are in it. Sprint, iteration, week — the word does not matter; the line around a promise does.

Making one

New cycle, a name, two dates. Then put work in it: drag tasks in from the backlog, or filter the task list to cycle = none and bulk-assign a selection.

One cycle per project is active at a time — the one whose dates contain today. That is what the project header shows, what the burn-up chart draws, and what a new task created from inside the project joins by default.

What it gives you

Progress	How many of the tasks in it are done, and how many points
Burn-up	Two lines over the cycle: everything in it, and everything finished. They meet when it is done
A filter everything understands	cycle = "Sprint 14", on any layout, in any saved view
A line in the past	What was in the cycle, and what actually got finished in it

The burn-up is a burn-up, not a burn-down, and the difference is the point: the top line is scope. Scope climbing mid-cycle is work being added, which is worth seeing rather than hiding under a falling line.

What happens when a cycle ends

Nothing automatic. Kolibri does not roll unfinished work forward, close the cycle or nag you, because every team’s answer to what happens to the three things we did not finish is different and a tool that picks one is a tool people fight.

What most teams do:

1. Filter the closing cycle to is: open.
2. Look at each one and decide: next cycle, back to the backlog, or it was never real.
3. Select the ones going forward and bulk-set the new cycle.

Three minutes, and the record of what the old cycle actually contained stays true.

Caution

Moving unfinished work into the next cycle changes the old cycle’s history: those tasks are no longer in it. If keeping the record matters more than keeping the board tidy — and for a team trying to work out why it keeps under-delivering, it does — leave them where they are and open new tasks instead.

One cycle, several projects

A cycle normally belongs to one project. Which projects run it in the new-cycle form offers two other answers:

• Chosen projects — tick the ones that are in it. Web and Mobile share a fortnight; Platform, on its own schedule, never sees it.
• Every project — the whole workspace, including projects made later.

Either way it is one cycle. That is the point: for a fortnight three teams genuinely share — one planning meeting, one end date — three separate cycles with the same name drift apart within a month, and each project then draws a burn-up of a thing nobody planned per project.

	Just this project	Chosen projects	Every project
Appears in	Its project’s Cycles tab	The Cycles tab of each one, chipped 2 projects	Every project’s Cycles tab, marked Shared
Work in it	That project’s	Any of theirs	Any project’s
Progress shown	Its own	The whole cycle’s, on every tab — the same cycle showing different numbers depending on where you opened it would be worse	The whole cycle’s
Deleting it	Affects one project	Takes it out of all of them	Takes it out of all of them

The scope is fixed when you create it, in the interface. There is no dropdown to re-scope a running cycle, because narrowing one silently strands the dropped projects’ tasks — a change to your data wearing the clothes of a setting. Make the new one and move the work.

An assistant can re-scope one over MCP, and it will tell you what it did: update_cycle returns the tasks left in a cycle that no longer covers their project, by name, having moved none of them.

Note

Exporting a project takes a shared cycle with it, and it arrives at the far end as an ordinary cycle of the imported project. That is the truth there: the other projects that shared it are not in the file.

Cycles and modules are different questions

A cycle answers when. A module answers what is this part of. A task can be in both, and usually is: Sprint 14 and Payments v2.

If you find yourself making a cycle called Payments v2 and stretching its dates whenever the work slips, that is a module trying to get out.

Over MCP

list_cycles, create_cycle, update_cycle and delete_cycle are tools an assistant can use. Combined with project_status and the sprint_planning prompt, “what did not get finished last cycle and what is blocking it” is a question you can ask rather than a report you assemble. See connecting an assistant.