The Tide

Move a card. Everything else replans itself.

The Tide is the part of Narcove that does what you used to do by hand. When work finishes early, downstream cards pull forward. When something slips, the rest of the schedule adjusts. Safe changes apply on their own. Risky changes wait for you. The plan keeps itself honest.

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A card finishes early, and the Tide carries downstream cards forward.

What's hard right now

Three things every PM tool gets wrong

Schedules drift. You set dates on a Monday. Work moves through the week. Some things finish early. Some slip. Nothing else updates. By Friday the schedule is wrong. By the next Monday you stop trusting it.

Replanning is manual. A card slips. You open the Gantt. You drag five cards. You check the dependencies. You update the launch date. You email the client. An hour gone. A week later it happens again. You start booking time for "replanning" and lose half your Friday to it.

Gains go missing. Work finishes early all the time. Most tools just leave the next card where it was. You earned an hour but you don't spend it on anything because the next thing isn't scheduled to start yet. By the end of the project you've given the same hour back over and over.

What the Tide does

Four jobs you stop doing by hand

Cascades downstream. Move a card and the Tide walks the chain of cards that depend on it. Each one gets a new start time and finish time. The cascade respects working hours, bank holidays, and per-person queues so the answer is realistic — not a date that falls on a Sunday.

Pulls forward. When work finishes early, the Tide pulls the next-ready card on the same person's queue forward into the freed slot. Gains compound across a project instead of evaporating into whitespace. A team that pulls forward consistently ships a week early on a six-week project — without anyone working harder.

Surfaces what's risky. Push-backs on the critical path move the project end. Push-backs over four hours risk breaking commitments. The Tide never applies these on its own. You see a review prompt with the diff. One click accepts; one click reverts. You choose what risk to take.

Writes a log. Every move writes a row to the Tide log with a one-line reason: "pulled forward 4 hours because wireframes finished early" or "pushed back 2 days because the brief slipped half a day." The log shows on the public client portal. The Friday status email you used to write — the log writes it.

How it works

Seven steps from move to replanned

  1. 1

    You move a card

    Drag a card to a new column, mark it done, change how long it takes, or update its dependencies. The Tide watches every kind of change.

  2. 2

    The Tide checks downstream work

    We walk the dependency graph forward from the card you moved. Any card that depends on it — directly or through a chain — is in scope.

  3. 3

    We recompute every projection

    For each card in scope, we work out the new start and finish. We use working hours, bank holidays, and per-person queues so the answer is realistic.

  4. 4

    Safe changes apply on their own

    Pull-forwards always apply. Small push-backs (under four hours, off the critical path) also apply. You see the change appear; you don't have to confirm.

  5. 5

    Risky changes surface

    Big push-backs and any push-back on a critical-path card show up in a review prompt. You see the diff and choose to apply or revert. Nothing changes until you decide.

  6. 6

    We log everything

    Every move writes a row to the Tide log with the trigger, the affected cards, the size of the shift, and a plain-language reason. The log shows on the public client portal.

  7. 7

    Forward-pull fires

    If you finished a card, we check the assignee's queue. If they have a next-ready card, we pull its start time into the slot you freed. Their queue compacts on its own.

The trust question

What about push-backs? Doesn't that make me nervous?

The honest answer is yes — until you watch how it works. Most tools either move everything for you (scary) or move nothing (useless). The Tide splits the middle. It only auto-applies changes that can't hurt you: pull-forwards, and small push-backs that don't touch the critical path.

Anything bigger waits for your call. You see a review card with the diff: which cards move, which dates shift, what the new project end is. You compare to the target end on the Chart. You accept, revert, or partial-accept. The Tide doesn't make decisions you would have wanted to make yourself.

And every cascade is reversible. If a Tide move turns out to have been wrong — maybe a dependency was missing, maybe a card's estimate was off — you click revert in the log and the whole cascade unwinds. Nothing is permanent.

Use cases

Five times the Tide pays for itself

Why this matters

A schedule you can trust changes how you work

When the schedule is wrong, you stop using it. You manage by gut, by Slack, by the loudest person in the room. The plan in the tool is for show. The real plan is in your head, and your head is full.

When the schedule is right, you point at it. New request? "That moves launch by two days. Worth it?" A client asks for an ETA? "The Chart says Wednesday — here's the link." You spend less time chasing and more time deciding. The work is the same; the load on you is lower.

The Tide is the difference. Every project tool will show you a Gantt. Most don't do anything when reality moves. Narcove does, and the schedule stays honest from kickoff to ship without anyone keeping it that way by hand.

FAQ

Tide questions

What does the Tide actually do?

When you move a card — finish it early, slip it, change how long it takes — the Tide works out what should happen to the cards that depend on it. Safe changes apply on their own. Risky changes wait for you to say yes. You see what changed and why.

What counts as a 'safe' change?

Pull-forwards always apply — work landing earlier never causes harm. Push-backs apply on their own only if they are small (under four hours) and the card isn't on the critical path. Any push-back bigger than that, or any push-back on a critical-path card, surfaces for you to review with a one-click revert.

Can I undo a cascade?

Yes — every cascade is logged in the Replan History panel. You see the trigger card, the cards that moved, the time, and the reason. One click reverts the whole cascade. You can also revert individual cards if only some of the moves were wrong.

Will it move work I've assigned to a fixed date?

No. If you've pinned a card to a hard date, the Tide treats that date as final and routes around it. The cards downstream of a pinned card still flow through the cascade as normal — but the pinned one stays where you put it.

What is forward-pull?

When you finish a card, the Tide checks whether the same person has another card waiting. If they do, and the card has nothing else blocking it, the Tide pulls its start time into the slot you just freed. You don't lose the gain to whitespace.

How does it work with multiple people?

Each person has their own queue. The Tide makes sure two cards on the same person never run at the same time. When one person finishes early, only their queue compacts. Other people's schedules don't change unless the cascade reaches them through dependencies.

What if my team works different hours?

Set per-person working hours and days off in your workspace settings. The Tide respects them. UK bank holidays are skipped by default. The cascade never schedules anyone to work outside the hours you set.

Can clients see what changed?

Yes. Every cascade writes a Tide log entry — "pulled forward 4 hours because copy review finished early" — that shows on the public client portal. Clients see the new dates and the reason at the same time. You stop sending status emails because the log already wrote them.

Related

How the Tide fits with the rest of Narcove

Try the Tide on a real project

Free for one project. Card cascades and forward-pull included.