Resource Planning

Resource planning turns an approved brief into an official draft project. Ru proposes roles, eligible people, tasks, hours, dependencies, key dates, and costs, following your resource planning AI Directive and the client and organisation context available to it.

The result is a proposal, not a live commitment. Its schedules reserve capacity as tentative until a person reviews and activates the project.

Assigned tasks in a draft project do not appear in My Tasks or personal calendars. You can review them in the project, Capacity and Gantt while the plan is tentative. After activation, assigned tasks appear in My Tasks and confirmed scheduled work becomes eligible for calendar sync. Returning a project to draft removes its tasks from My Tasks and removes its calendar entries after the next successful sync.

Review the plan

Use the project header and tabs to check:

• project name, brief, budget, start date, end date, and key dates;
• each selected team member, their role, rate-card role, hours, and rate;
• task names, descriptions, assignments, estimates, dates, and dependencies;
• tentative capacity in the Capacity view;
• planned cost against budget, if you can view financial information;
• linked brief files in Files; and
• warnings that require a budget, rate-card, staffing, or schedule decision.

When planning had anything to flag, Ru also posts its notes into the draft project’s chat: warnings that need your review, assumptions it made where the brief was thin, and risks to keep in mind. Open the chat from the message icon on the project page to read them. A clean plan posts nothing.

The planning run records alternative candidates and warnings with the draft, but the project team contains the selected eligible people. When a role has no eligible person in the workspace, the draft still includes that role’s tasks with their dates and estimates. The tasks are left unassigned, and a planning warning names the role, so you can invite or add the right person and assign the work. Use Open team schedule or the Capacity view when you need a closer availability review. Tentative hours from this draft appear with a hatched amber pattern in every capacity view, so reviewers can see proposed load without mistaking it for confirmed work. Use the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the capacity timeline to move backward or forward through the dates. On a long list, the scrollbar stays at the bottom of the browser window while the timeline remains in view.

Edit roles and tasks

Use Team to add or remove members, change project access, choose the project rate card, and update a person’s rate-card role. Use Timeline → Table for fast inline task edits, bulk changes, grouping, filters, and dependency links. Use Gantt to review the sequence visually.

Moving a task or changing its hours rebuilds its schedule. Dependencies can push later work forward through working days, closure dates, and each assignee’s blocked-out dates. Review the timeline notice after these edits, especially when it reports conflicts or rescheduled dependants.

Planning schedules around each person’s blocked-out dates the same way it avoids closure dates, booking at most the remaining hours on partially blocked days, and the capacity views mark those days so you can see why work lands where it does.

Working hours, weekends, closure dates, dependency shifts, and date-only task boundaries use the organisation timezone. Local start times remain stable across daylight-saving changes. An administrator can review the timezone under Settings > Organisation Settings.

The task editor uses that timezone for start, finish, conflict times and saved automatic daily hours. Milestone target dates stay on their calendar date when the timezone changes.

Some schedule changes require planning, task-update, and brief-edit access. If a control is unavailable, ask an organisation or project administrator to review your permissions.

Understand the planning rules

Organisation defaults and client overrides can control whether planning favours commercial efficiency, balanced choices, or timing and capacity. They can also make budget mandatory, hide financials, or require rate-card confirmation.

The resource planning and project creation AI Directives, organisation-wide or the client’s overrides, can require roles, tasks, reviews, meetings, or exclusions. These rules guide the proposal, but they never bypass active organisation membership, the client’s initial staffing list, permissions, or available capacity. After the draft exists, an authorised project owner can deliberately add another active staff member to this project only.

Activate the reviewed project

Most project edits save through their own control. Brief changes save when the editor loses focus. Confirm that changes have finished before activation.

Choose Activate project when the plan is final. Activation:

1. checks any required project budget;
2. checks any required project rate-card confirmation; and
3. changes every tentative task schedule on the project to confirmed capacity.

If the action says Confirm rate card, open Team and select the intended card, even if the default shown is already correct. If it says Set budget, enter the budget from the project header. The activation action becomes available after the gate is cleared.

Continue with Project Management.

Shared task capacity

Assign several people to one task when they share the same work, dates and progress. Each person’s capacity view shows their own allocation. The task estimate is per person: a four-hour task with two assignees uses eight hours of team capacity. Removing a person releases their allocation. Dragging a shared task from one person’s row to another’s hands over only that person’s place; everyone else stays on the task, and the whole task keeps its new dates. Draft work remains tentative, and unscheduled tasks reserve no capacity.

Moving the task to another date within the same person’s row keeps everyone assigned. If you hand it to someone already on the task, they keep one allocation for the full estimate. Open either person’s task row to edit the shared details.

Plan with unfilled roles

Reserve role places on a task when you know the skills and hours before choosing people. Project Capacity and the Schedule page’s Capacity view show Unfilled role demand. The panel covers all role demand in the selected project or workspace, including unscheduled estimates. It is separate from the current personal calendar window.

Each place shows its role, task, hours and scheduled dates, or Unscheduled estimate. Open the card to staff the task. Filling a place transfers its demand to that person’s capacity, so it disappears from the unfilled panel. Unfilled places do not book an individual or appear in anyone’s My Tasks.

A task can combine different roles, repeated places for one role, and named people. Each place uses the full task estimate. A four-hour task with two Designer places plans eight hours. Staffing either place preserves that total and the rate saved when it was reserved. The task’s planned value and quotes priced from the plan include each place once. Existing approved budgets and quotes stay unchanged; actual time is recorded per person.

Unfilled role demand includes projects visible through your current project and client staffing access. Removing that access removes those projects from demand on the next refresh.

Calendar week start

Schedule, capacity grids, resource planning and weekly timelines use the organisation’s chosen first day of the week. Sunday is the default. An admin or owner can choose Monday in Organisation Settings. Week headings and navigation follow this choice; task dates and each person’s working-day capacity stay the same.

On narrow screens, scroll a Gantt view horizontally to reach its date columns.

Review a saved brief plan

Older planning results can open a separate Resource Plan tab from Automation Queue > View Results. Open a role to review its selected person, hours, rate and tasks. On a narrow screen, the person selector sits above the task editor. The title, actions and tabs wrap, and the summary scrolls with the page so it does not cover your work.

When the plan is editable, change task descriptions, hours or dates, then choose Save above the roles. Choose Editor for task fields or Visual planner for the timeline. Task descriptions grow to show their text when the screen width changes. If saving fails, your edits stay in the form and Save remains available. Keep the page open and retry after the connection recovers. This also applies when you save changes in Key Dates.

A plan linked to an existing project is locked. Use Open Live Project to review and edit that project. Current planning runs open the draft project workspace described above.