Rollout guide
How to roll Workstate out across a team: phases, owners and a realistic timeline.
Who it's for
This guide is for whoever owns the rollout. That's often an engineering manager, a platform or IT lead, or the head of the first team to use it. The setup steps need someone with the Owner or Admin role in Workstate. You can be that person, or work with one.
The guide assumes you start with one pilot team, show the value, then add teams one at a time.
Before you start
- An account with an owner. Sign-up is invite-only.
- A GitHub account for everyone. People sign in with GitHub, and an invitation matches an email address that their GitHub account has verified.
- An MCP client for everyone, such as Claude Code, Claude desktop, Cursor or Codex. See Agents & clients.
- Knowledge in sources you can connect today: GitHub, Confluence, Jira or uploaded files.
Phases and timeline
A small team whose knowledge is already in GitHub or Confluence can finish in about 4 weeks. Allow 8 weeks if you have several sources, sensitive material that needs its own namespace, or people who have never set up an MCP client.
| Phase | When | What happens | Who leads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plan | Before week 1 | Goals, pilot team, success measures, risks | Rollout owner |
| Set up | Week 1 | Namespaces, sources, first sync, a search check | Admin |
| Design use cases | Weeks 1–2 | Three to five jobs for the pilot team, with prompts | Pilot lead and champions |
| Onboard | Week 2 | Invitations with each person's role and namespaces, welcome message, team page, agent instructions | Rollout owner |
| Activate | Weeks 2–5 | Three short sessions, then weekly office hours | Champions |
| Measure | Weeks 3–8 | A weekly scorecard, and a survey at weeks 4 and 8 | Rollout owner |
| Decide | Weeks 6–8 | Expand, adjust or stop, and plan the next team | Rollout owner and sponsor |
| Govern | Ongoing | Access reviews, key hygiene, offboarding | Admin |
The guide, step by step
Launch strategySet goals, pick a pilot team and an owner, and decide how you will know it worked.Admin setupNamespaces by team and sensitivity, sources, keys and roles, with a checklist.Designing use casesThree to five jobs per team, scored for effort and value.Onboarding kitA welcome message and a team page you can copy.ChampionsWho they are, what they do, and a weekly rhythm.Educate & activateShort sessions, the search-first habit and office hours.Measure & expandWhat you can measure today, a scorecard, a survey, and when to add the next team.Governance & offboardingOwners, access reviews, key hygiene and what happens when someone leaves.
What success looks like
By the end of the pilot, you should see three things:
- Agents cite their sources, and the citations hold up when people check them.
- Decisions and incidents reach the ledger in the week they happen, recorded by most of the team, not one enthusiast.
- People find an earlier decision before they redo the work, and say so.
Measure & expand shows how to observe each of these with what Workstate offers today.