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.

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 Admin > Organisation Settings.

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.