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OpenProject 16.1 has been released and this new version introduces many new features and improvements. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on the latest updates. Please take a few minutes to learn what changes for you. We will summarize the most important changes in this blog article and, as always, please see our release notes that contain all changes, features and bug fixes.
In this blog article, we will focus on the updates on project portfolio management with the new project phases and phase gates. We will also briefly summarize some more important features. Here is a quick navigation to all feature descriptions:
With OpenProject 16.1, we’re introducing a key milestone in structured portfolio planning. The new project life cycle feature lets you define distinct phases for each project and make informed go or no-go decisions at specific phase gates. It’s a major step toward managing not just individual projects but entire portfolios with greater clarity and control.
Projects don’t always move in a straight line. Priorities change. Resources shift. Instead of treating phase changes as automatic progress, you can now define phase gates as decision points. These gates mark the end of one phase or the start of the next, depending on your workflow. Think of it like a milestone, but with real decision-making logic behind it.
This approach is closely aligned with PM², the project management methodology developed by the European Commission and widely adopted in the public sector. Project gates can be used to validate scope, check alignment, or reassess priorities. And now, they’re built right into OpenProject.
Let’s say you’re on a steering committee and need to decide whether a project should move from Planning to Executing. You can now filter the project list for projects approaching that specific gate and save it as a separate view if you like:
When you start a new project, you first have to enable the phases under Project settings → Project life cycle. If you navigate to the project overview page next, you’ll see a new column on the right side called Project life cycle. Click on any phase to open the calendar and choose the dates. These will then be visible directly on the overview page:
Tip
To help you plan ahead, OpenProject automatically suggests a fixed start date for the next phase based on the one before. For example, if you set the Initiating phase from January 1 to January 31, the Planning phase will automatically start on February 1. If you shift an earlier phase, all following ones will be updated accordingly.
Of course, it makes sense to assign work packages to project phases so you can easily track what needs to be done in each step. Please note that in order to display a new attribute on your work packages, you have to adjust the type settings in the administration first. For example, you could add the project phase to the details section for the work package type Task:
Once that’s done, you can assign a project phase to each work package and filter or sort your tables accordingly:
You can also group your work packages by the project phase, for a more elaborate view:
Working with phases in a project life cycle helps keep your team aligned and your planning process transparent, especially when managing multiple projects at once.
See our system admin guide to learn all about the project life cycle in OpenProject.
While working with the default phases that are used in the PM² framework is a Community feature, setting up new custom phases is an Enterprise add-on available in the Premium and Corporate plan. With this feature, you decide how many phases your projects go through, what they are called, and in which order they appear.
If the Enterprise add-on is enabled, this setting is found in the global administration under Projects → Project life cycle.
You can also decide whether to include phase gates between the phases and whether these gates are used for filtering and reporting. For example, you might want to track decision points like “Go for pilot rollout” or “Ready for audit” in complex project environments.
You can now export your meeting agendas and outcomes as PDF documents. This is perfect for archiving or sharing information from the meeting. The export includes all agenda items, descriptions, outcomes, and related metadata in a clean, printable format.
See our user guide to learn more about meeting management with OpenProject.
When setting a reminder for a work package, you can now choose from smart default options like “Tomorrow” or “In 3 days”. These quick-select choices make it easier to stay on top of your tasks without manual date picking. If you do not use this feature yet, now would be the perfect time to give it a try!
Learn more about work package reminders in our user guide.
Working with tight schedules? You can now define a negative lag between related work packages. This means a successor can start before the predecessor ends. Negative lag is particularly useful for overlapping tasks or time-critical parallel planning.
Please note that only working days are taken into account. Also, a negative lag can be counterintuitive, as a lag of 0 schedules the successor one day after the predecessor’s finish date – and so on.
See our user guide to learn all about work package relations in OpenProject.
If you’re using hierarchy custom fields (Enterprise add-on), you can now view and expand the entire hierarchy tree directly from the work package view. This makes it easier to understand parent-child relations at a glance.
Learn more about custom fields of type hierarchy in our system admin guide.
The date picker component has been updated to improve screen reader support and comply with accessibility standards. ARIA live regions now announce focused dates, helping users with assistive technology navigate date fields more easily.
Learn more about these accessibility improvements in our release notes for version 16.1.
Follow the upgrade guide for the packaged installation or Docker installation to update your OpenProject installation to OpenProject 16.1. We update your hosted OpenProject environments (Enterprise cloud) today, June 18, 2025.
You will find more information about all new features and changes in our Release notes or in the OpenProject Documentation.
If you need support, you can post your questions in the Community Forum, or if you are eligible for Enterprise support, please contact us and we are happy to support you personally.
A very special thank you goes to City of Cologne, Deutsche Bahn and ZenDiS for sponsoring released or upcoming features. Your support, alongside the efforts of our amazing Community, helps drive these innovations. Also a big thanks to our Community members for reporting bugs and helping us identify and provide fixes. Special thanks for reporting and finding bugs go to Cameron Dutro and Maxim Béliveau.
Last but not least, we are very grateful for our very engaged translation contributors on Crowdin, who translated quite a few OpenProject strings! This release we would like to particularly thank the following users:
Would you like to help out with translations yourself? Then take a look at our translation guide and find out exactly how you can contribute. It is very much appreciated!
As always, we welcome any feedback on this release. 💙
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If you are already using OpenProject with your team to manage projects, you might want to explore additional use cases. One of them is ticket tracking: a flexible way to manage internal requests, service tasks, or user support alongside your existing workflows.
While OpenProject is primarily a project and task management tool, we are planning to release additional features in 2025 that will further support using it as a lightweight helpdesk solution.
In OpenProject, you use work packages as tickets. All team members can create tickets and fill in the relevant information. You can define a dedicated work package type such as ‘Ticket’ or ‘Request’ to structure this.
You could also use the option to automatically create tickets from incoming emails. This is useful when external requests or issues are submitted via email — for example, when OpenProject is used as a lightweight helpdesk tool.
Tip
Later this year, we plan to develop a feature to support you in using OpenProject as a helpdesk tool even more.
In order to capture all relevant information, you have different options to customize your work packages. One is to customize your work package types. If you like, you could create a work package type TICKET. Or you use the work package type TASK for tickets and add additional types such as sales opportunity to track those differently. Make sure that your work package forms are set up with fields for information that is required. Customize the work package forms to your needs. Remove any fields that are irrelevant, e.g. version. And you could add custom fields to your work packages, such as ticket type to indicate if it was coming in call or email or from your website.
You can also define workflows that control which status changes are allowed and by whom — for example, to separate internal review from external resolution. Learn more in our article on how to use status transitions for custom workflows.
The work package table will show you all tickets with the details that you would like to be displayed. Use the comprehensive filter option to sort the ticket list as needed, e.g. by priority, status, assignee or type of ticket / work package.
Set filters in your ticket list, choose the attributes shown and save it to have it always at hand with a single click.
Tip: You can also use attribute highlighting (Enterprise add-on) to visually prioritize certain ticket types or statuses. For example, highlight priorities with different background colors. Read how to visually prioritize tickets in our article on Attribute highlighting
In the detail view of your work package, you can add comments to your ticket. If you mention team members with @name, they will receive a notification and reply accordingly.
Set reminders for a specific date and time, or activate date alerts to automatically notify team members when a ticket is due or needs attention (Enterprise add-on). Learn how to configure reminders and date alerts.
Another great new feature that helps you communicating on tickets is using internal comments (Enterprise add-on): For internal discussions that should not be visible to external collaborators (e.g. when a work package is shared). These are visible only to specific roles. Read more in our article on internal comments.
If you prefer a board view to work on your tickets and have a better, visual overview, you can use the agile boards in OpenProject. Choose a status board to know how many tickets are still open or check on your team by viewing the assignee board and how many tickets each team member is working on.
To get a quick overview of all tickets, the project overview can provide information about how many tickets are closed and how many are still open.
This is how you could manage tickets in OpenProject on a small scale which could be an additional benefit to your project management in OpenProject.
This is how you could manage tickets in OpenProject on a small or medium scale – a flexible and transparent solution that complements classic project management workflows.
Want to see how public administrations use OpenProject for internal ticket management? Read our article on digital ticket management in municipalities.
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