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Projects & Work

Smart Insights

Intermediate6 min read

An automatic, rule-based analysis engine that surfaces risks, blockers, and overdue issues on every task — so problems are caught before they derail a sprint.

Key concepts

  • Insight: A single actionable recommendation about a task (e.g., "This task is 3 days overdue", "Assignee is on leave during the sprint end").
  • Severity: How urgent the insight is — Critical (red), High (amber), or Medium (lighter amber). The card sorts insights by severity, so critical issues show first.
  • Category: An internal grouping — Blocker, Risk, or Cross-module (pulls in data from Leave, Invoices, etc.). Category does not drive the display order; the UI sorts by severity and only uses category to give cross-module insights a distinct violet accent.
  • Confidence: How certain the engine is about the insight (hardcoded per rule). Overdue tasks are 100% confident; velocity forecasts are probabilistic.
  • Dismiss: Hide an insight for 7 days so it doesn't keep nagging after you have acknowledged it.
  • Tenant settings: Admins can toggle each insight type on or off, and tune thresholds (stale days, workload cap, dismiss duration, max displayed).

Smart Insights is rule-based, not AI — every recommendation comes from deterministic logic on your data.

How to

Step-by-step

Acting on an Insight

  1. Open a task that shows insights.

  2. Each insight has a primary action (colored button) and usually a secondary action (ghost button, typically "Dismiss").

  3. Click the primary action to resolve it — QONE updates the task in place and re-checks the insight.

  4. If the insight no longer applies after your change, it disappears on the next refresh.

Dismissing

  1. Click Dismiss on any insight you have acknowledged but don't want to act on right now.

  2. That insight type stays hidden for that task, for you, for 7 days (tenant-configurable).

  3. Dismissals are per user — your teammate still sees the same insight on their view.

  1. Navigate to Settings > Insights.

  2. Toggle individual insight types on or off.

  3. Tune thresholds:

    • Workload threshold — task count that triggers HIGH_WORKLOAD (default 8)
    • Stale threshold days — days of inactivity before STALE_TASK (default 7)
    • Dismiss duration days — how long a dismissal hides an insight (default 7)
    • Max insights displayed — how many to show per task (default 3)

  4. Click Save. Changes take effect within a few minutes (settings are cached for 5 min).

Where You See Insights

Open any task in any project. The task detail modal shows a Smart Insights card in its right sidebar with up to 3 current insights, sorted by severity.

[Screenshot: Task details modal with a Smart Insights card showing two highlighted issues]

If there are no issues, the card shows a green checkmark and "No issues" — a useful at-a-glance signal that the task is on track.

Click Refresh on the card header to re-run the analysis immediately (normally it refreshes on task open and is cached for 5 minutes).

How it works under the hood

  • Client-side rules (Overdue, Missing Due Date, Stale, Unassigned Subtasks) run instantly in the browser from the task data already loaded.
  • Server-side rules (Leave Conflict, Velocity Forecast, High Workload, Dependency Blocked, Linked Invoice Pending) require database queries and are cached for 5 minutes per task.
  • All rules are deterministic — no AI is involved. You can read the exact thresholds in the insight description.

Tips & best practices

  • Treat Critical insights as blockers. If a task shows Overdue or Leave Conflict, resolve it before starting new work — otherwise a sprint miss is likely.
  • Use Dismiss deliberately. A dismissal expires in 7 days, so persistent issues resurface. Dismiss means "I know, leave me alone for now" — not "ignore forever."
  • Tune the workload threshold to your team size. 8 is reasonable for full-time engineers; lower for part-time or contract roles.
  • Don't disable insight types lightly. The defaults are chosen so the most common project-management risks surface automatically. Disabling HIGH_WORKLOAD, for example, means nothing will warn you about burnout until someone misses a deadline.
  • Combine with Tempo. Velocity forecasts are more accurate when your team logs time consistently.
  • Link invoices to projects so LINKED_INVOICE_PENDING triggers — it's a great "don't ship more work until the client pays" guardrail.

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