About Kharazm

The problem

Program teams carry a lot of accountability and scattered context

A program team is rarely working on one thing in one place. It may be coordinating several efforts at once, each with a different owner, audience, deadline and reporting rhythm. The individual work is usually visible. Knowing where the whole program stands — and explaining why — is the hard part.

Status lives in scattered places

A spreadsheet for the schedule, a shared drive for supporting material, a message thread for blockers. Nothing is wrong with any one of them, but nobody can answer "how is the whole portfolio doing?" without asking several people first.

Reporting is rebuilt by hand

The weekly update to a director, a board or a grant officer is often re-typed from scratch. It takes hours, it drifts from what the plan actually says, and last month's version is impossible to reconstruct once the source sheet has moved on.

The tools assume a different job

Generic task tools can lose the program context; heavyweight portfolio suites can require a long configuration project. Neither is a comfortable fit for a program manager who needs a clear plan, visible risk and a defensible update.

What it is

One place for the plan, the work and the update

Kharazm keeps a program's objective, dates, owner, tasks, milestones, risks and status in one workspace, and builds reporting from that same data instead of a separate document. When someone moves a task or resolves a risk, the board, the timeline and the next stakeholder update reflect it.

It is deliberately small enough to learn in an afternoon. There is no methodology to adopt, no certification to earn, and no vocabulary that a non-technical program coordinator has to translate.

Programs with an owner, dates, objective, progress and an explainable health rating
Tasks on a board or a list, with status, priority, assignee, due date, labels and a blocked flag
Milestones, a Gantt-style timeline, and a workflow view with live counts
Risks, assumptions, issues and decisions tracked with owners and resolutions
Reports that count blocked, overdue, unassigned and open RAID items
Weekly stakeholder updates you draft, publish, and keep as a read-only snapshot
Award records with subrecipients, written risk assessments, dated monitoring, evidence links and a printable audit pack
Portfolios, a team page with reporting lines and open-task counts, and an admin audit log

Read the full feature breakdown

The name

Where "Kharazm" comes from

The name is a nod to Khwarazm, the historic region along the lower Amu Darya, and to the scholar who carried its name west.

Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi — "the one from Khwarazm" — was a ninth-century mathematician, astronomer and geographer who worked in Baghdad. Two ordinary English words come directly from him.

The first is algorithm. Medieval European scholars, translating his work on Hindu-Arabic numerals, Latinised his name as Algoritmi. What began as "the method that al-Khwarizmi describes" became the general word for any step-by-step procedure.

The second is algebra. His treatise on solving equations, al-Kitab al-mukhtasar fi hisab al-jabr wa'l-muqabala, gave us al-jabr — the restoring or rebalancing of an equation — which entered European languages as "algebra".

What makes him a fitting namesake is not the fame of those two words but the reason his books travelled. He wrote procedures down plainly, in an order a reader could follow, so that the same problem produced the same answer in someone else's hands. That is the ambition here in a much smaller domain: the work behind a program's status should be recorded consistently, visible to the people responsible for it, and explainable to anyone who asks why.

The eight-pointed mark

The Kharazm symbol is a rub el hizb: an eight-pointed star formed by laying one square across another at forty-five degrees. It has a long history in Islamic art, architecture and manuscripts, where among other uses it marks the divisions of a long text so a reader can always find their place.

That is a reasonable thing for a program tool to borrow. Most program work is long work — a cross-functional launch, an organizational change, a grant initiative, or a learning program — and the useful thing is not only a finish line but a set of reliable way-markers along it. Our version adds a small circle at the centre, for the program the whole plan is arranged around.

Principles

Six decisions that shape everything else

These are not aspirations. Each one is visible in the product, and each one costs something — which is how you can tell it is real.

Plain language over jargon

A task is late, blocked, or waiting on someone. A program is on track, at risk, off track, or not started. Nobody has to know what a burndown chart or a RACI matrix is to use Kharazm, and nothing important is hidden behind a term of art.

Permissions are enforced on the server

Hiding a button is a courtesy, not a control. Every write in Kharazm passes one capability check on the server, with the actor read from the session and never from the request. Four roles — admin, manager, member, viewer — behave the same way whether the request came from the interface or from anywhere else.

No browser trackers

There is no analytics script, session recorder, advertising pixel or external font in the browser. The browser connects only to Kharazm's own origin. The hosted service still depends on the infrastructure and optional email providers named in the privacy policy.

Reporting uses workspace data

Report counts come from programs, tasks and RAID items in that workspace. If there is nothing to count, a chart says so instead of showing a pleasing shape. Program health remains a manager-recorded judgment, shown beside the underlying work rather than presented as an automatic score.

Say what is not built yet

Kharazm has no integrations with Slack, Teams, Workday or an LMS, no single sign-on, and no file storage. Those gaps are written down on the pricing, security and FAQ pages rather than left for a buyer to discover after a procurement review.

Published updates cannot be quietly edited

A weekly stakeholder update is a draft you can revise as often as you like. The moment it is published it becomes a fixed, read-only snapshot with the evidence it was based on. The version preserved in March can still be reopened later even after the live plan changes.

Read the security and privacy model

Who makes Kharazm

Kharazm is built and operated by Bakaro Art LLC. It is proprietary software: the company owns the code and runs the service, and the workspace you use is hosted rather than something you install.

The service runs on Fly.io, with managed PostgreSQL provided by Neon; transactional email goes through Resend, and billing through Stripe. Passwords are stored as scrypt hashes with a per-user salt, two-step sign-in with an authenticator app is available to everyone, sessions are opaque tokens whose hash is all that is kept, and every change to workspace records creates an organization-scoped audit entry that admins can read. Entries record who, when and the before and after values, and the database refuses to edit or delete them. The full account, including the gaps, is on the security page.

What is not on this page

There are no customer logos here, and no testimonials, case studies or adoption figures. That is not modesty or a design choice — Kharazm is early and there are no customers to name yet. Publishing invented ones would undermine the only claim on this site that really matters, which is that the numbers inside the product are real.

You will also not find a headcount, an office address, a founding story or a funding announcement. None of those would help you evaluate the software, and several would be filler. What we can tell you is exactly what the product does today, exactly how it protects a workspace, and exactly what it cannot do yet.

Talk to us

Questions, access requests, procurement and security reports all go to one address: hello@bakaroart.com. The contact page explains what to include so the first reply is a useful one, and the FAQ answers most of what people ask before requesting a workspace.

Initial registration is approval-gated. A signed-out person requesting their first workspace confirms their email address, which creates a pending request that an operator reviews. Invited teammates join once they accept the invitation, and an already signed-in user can create an additional workspace without another review. Production contains no seeded demo accounts.

See how access works