What data do child projects inherit from parents?

Some OutNav subscription types allow for parent and child projects to be created, meaning updates to a parent project will be automatically transferred to any children it has. This article goes into more detail on which types of data are transferred from parent to child, and which are not.

If you are an organisation admin and want to know how to create a parent and child project, please see 'Cloning a project'.

When you clone a project, the child project that is created inherits the following from its parent: project background, pathways, steps, stepping stones, success criteria, sources, images, evidence standards, risks and assumptions, library files and comments.

After the cloning process, parent and child projects remain linked. This means that, generally speaking, creating, updating or deleting any of the above items in the parent project will automatically make the same changes to the child project, though there are a few special cases.

The table below clarifies what types of data a child will inherit from its parent, along with additional relevant information.

Please note that, as of July 2023, analysis entered at the stepping stone and step summary level do NOT carry over from parent projects to child projects. However, changes made to the stepping stones themselves, such as creating, renaming or deleting them, will still carry over.

DATA TYPE	INHERITED?	FURTHER INFORMATION
Project Background	Yes	The Project Background is copied over from parent to child when the project is first cloned; however, from that point on they are unlinked and can be edited independently from each other.
Step Headings	Yes	In a child project, you cannot create, update or delete step headings in the Define Steps section of Project Settings - this must be done via the parent project.
Stepping Stones	Yes	Rearranging the position of stepping stones within a column will not carry over from a parent project to a child project.
Pathways	Yes	From within a child project you cannot delete a pathway that was created in a parent project, but you can create new pathways that are exclusive to the child project.
Success Criteria	Yes	From within a child project you cannot delete a success criteria that was created in a parent project.
Sources	Yes	From within a child project you cannot delete a source that was created in a parent project.
Evidence	Yes	From within a child project, you cannot delete evidence that was added in a parent project.
Evidence Standards	Yes	Updating any of the evidence standards within a parent project will cause ALL the evidence standards in the child project to be updated to match its parent.
Risks & Assumptions	Yes	From within a child project, you cannot update or delete a risk or assumption that was added in a parent project.
Library Files	Yes
Images	Yes	Deleting an image from the image library in a parent project does NOT delete the image from the child project.
Comments	Yes
Tasks	No	Existing tasks will be copied across when the project is cloned, but any tasks added after the cloning process will not be transferred over.
Analysis/Ratings	No	Analysis and progress/confidence ratings entered at stepping stone level do not carry over from parents to children.
Step Summaries	No	Step summaries do not carry over from parents to children.
Image Creator	No	Any images you have exported from the image creator will be carried over within the image manager; however, any editable projects within the image creator will not be carried over from parent to child.
Live Reports	No
Word Reports	No
User Permissions	No	Child projects have unique user permissions, so an organisation admin will need to add users to the project before they can access it, even if they had access to the parent project.
Activity Feed	No