Planner guide

The Planner holds a project's schedule, resources, baselines, progress, actuals, risk and change in one document, and reschedules after every edit. This guide follows the rail from File to Panels and the bottom pane across its tabs.

The window

Every open project is a tab across the top; the Portfolio tab is always first. The Schedule view shows the activity table and the Gantt chart; the Dashboard view shows the project at a glance: forecast finish, progress, SPI and CPI, cost at completion, manpower, risk, change requests, schedule health and the earned value S-curve. The timescale switches between weeks, months and quarters; zoom in and out from the rail.

The status bar at the bottom reports the last action on the left and the activity, relationship and critical counts on the right. The header shows the period SPI and CPI, the data date and the forecast finish.

Activities and logic

Select a WBS node and add an activity from the rail. An activity has a type (task, start or finish milestone, level of effort), an original and a remaining duration, a calendar, and optional primary and secondary constraints (start or finish on, on or after, on or before, as late as possible). Relationships are typed FS, SS, FF or SF with a lag in hours; a lag can run on the predecessor's, the successor's or a 24-hour calendar.

The Details pane edits the selected activity: dates and status, relationships, resources, expenses, steps, quantities, codes, risk and notes. Right-click an activity for the context menu. Undo and Redo cover every edit.

The Issues panel lists open ends, loops, out-of-sequence progress and unsatisfied constraints, and scores the schedule against the DCMA 14-point assessment.

Calendars and holidays

The Project panel holds the calendars: a working week of hours a day and days a week, with exceptions. Add statutory holidays for a Canadian province or a US state for a range of years in one click; name individual days. An activity can use a calendar other than the project's, for example a 7x10 outage calendar inside a 5x8 project.

Resources and rates

The Resources panel lists labour, equipment and material resources with a code, a limit (units available at a time) and a rate per hour. A rate can be a single figure or built up from a base wage plus a rate set: payroll burden, benefits, small tools, overhead and profit as percentages of the wage, dollars per hour or percentages of the running total. Rate sets come across from the Estimator with the estimate.

An assignment is a resource on an activity with a crew size and, when it differs, its own rate and spread (even, front, back, bell). Level resources keeps every resource within its limit by delaying work; the leveled dates are shown beside the early dates.

The Resource histogram tab in the bottom pane shows units and cumulative hours by week for one resource, all labour or all equipment, stacked by resource, type, WBS or activity code. Skyline shows the activities finishing each week, by status.

Expenses

An expense is a cost on an activity that is not a resource's hours: material, subcontract, equipment hire. It has a category, a budget and, once known, an actual. Expenses are part of the activity's total cost, the cash flow and the earned value.

Baselines

A baseline is the schedule as it stood: each activity's start, finish, duration, cost and quantities. Keep one from the Project panel at any time; the first kept becomes active. Another project in the browser can also serve as a baseline, matched by activity ID. The active baseline draws as the thin bar under each activity, feeds the variance columns and is the performance measurement baseline for earned value.

Progress and earned value

Progress is recorded with the Update panel. Set the new data date, then for each activity in the period: started or finished, the actual dates, the remaining duration or the percent complete, and the hours worked. Activities that ran to plan can be auto-completed. Recording the update stores a snapshot of planned value, earned value and actual cost at the old data date, so the curves and the period indices build up month by month.

Percent complete can come from the remaining duration, from steps (rules of credit, weighted) or from installed quantities; the project chooses which.

The Progress panel shows the earned value at the data date: PV, EV, AC, the variances, SPI and CPI, the EACs (remaining work at budget, performance to date continuing), ETC, VAC and TCPI, overall and by WBS, in cost, labour hours or duration. Thresholds flag a variance that needs a variance analysis. The Progress curves tab plots the S-curves and the recorded updates; Commodity curves plots installed quantities against plan and the rate needed to finish.

Actuals from timesheets and contractor costs

The Actuals panel imports timesheets (worker, trade, charge code, hours, overtime) and contractor costs (vendor, reference, charge, category, amount; invoice, accrual or reversal) from CSV or pasted rows. Charge codes are matched to activities and trades to resources, once, and remembered. The lines become the actual hours and cost on assignments and expenses, and sit in the cash flow on their own dates. Accruals can be reversed at the next data date. Every import is a batch that can be removed.

Forecast and cash flow

The Forecast tab shows cost, labour hours or FTE by period: actual to date, remaining by the schedule, cumulative, against each baseline, with the peak manpower and the headcount by trade. Every table exports to CSV.

Schedule and cost risk

The Risk panel sets up a Monte Carlo analysis. Quick risk gives every activity a three-point estimate as percentages of its duration (triangle, BetaPERT or uniform); an activity's Risk tab refines it. Correlation within a WBS keeps estimates moving together. Risk factors scale the durations of the activities they are assigned to with a chance of occurring; weather calendars take days out by period or close a season with uncertain start and finish dates. Activities can be probabilistic (may not exist), links can be probabilistic, and branches pick one successor path by probability. Cost uncertainty applies to resource rates and expenses.

A run reschedules the whole network in every iteration, with Latin hypercube or Monte Carlo sampling and a fixed seed. The Risk tab in the bottom pane shows the finish and cost distributions with P-dates, the joint confidence of meeting both, each activity's criticality and sensitivity, and the drivers. Runs before and after the register's responses, or with and without a change, are saved as scenarios and compared on one chart. P50 to P80 bars can be drawn on the Gantt.

The risk register

The Register panel holds threats and opportunities with cause, event, effect and trigger, an owner, a probability and cost and schedule impacts before and after the response, the response and its actions, and the activities affected. The heat map uses your organization's matrix. Modelled risks enter the simulation as events on their activities.

Change requests and what-if scenarios

A change request (Changes req. panel) has a title, category, reason, requester, estimate and the activities it touches, and moves through draft, submitted, under review, approved or rejected, implemented or withdrawn, with a history. Model it in a scenario makes a what-if copy of the project; change durations, logic, crews, rates or add work there, and the impact on the finish, cost, hours and peak manpower is measured against the live project. Approve, then promote the scenario to apply its changes, or implement by hand.

The What-if panel also models the remaining work in bulk: productivity, crews, rates, expenses, scope growth, a hold on work not started, and crashing with overtime, extra crews, bonus or fast-tracking on the critical path or a WBS.

The Changes panel is the change log: every recorded change with who, when, what and the effect on the finish and the budget.

Activity codes, layouts and views

Codes define code types (area, discipline, system, contract) with values and colours; assign them in the Details pane. The table can be grouped by WBS, by a code type or not at all, filtered to open, critical, behind or started, and sorted. Layout chooses the columns from the full list (dates, floats, variances, resources, costs, earned value, quantities, steps, risk results, counts) and saves the arrangement as a named view. Bars can be coloured by status, float, risk criticality, WBS or code.

Links between projects

An activity can have a predecessor or successor in another project in the same browser or workspace. The other project's dates drive this one at scheduling; both projects keep the link. The Portfolio timeline shows them.

Reports and printing

Report builds a project report pack: status summary, earned value, schedule, milestones, resources, risk, change log, with your sections picked and a cover. Print prints the schedule as laid out, to PDF through the browser. Every table in the product exports to CSV; XER exports the schedule to the enterprise scheduler.

Files, folders and the cloud

Save writes a .planner.json. An autosave folder keeps every project written as you work with daily backups. A cloud workspace syncs every save to the server and shares with members; a newer version saved by someone else is never overwritten silently. See Data exchange and API.

Keyboard