Project planning
The planning board answers "who is doing what, when". For dispatch work that is the whole question: a job arrives, it gets assigned, it gets done.
Work that runs for months asks a different question. It has a budget, a team, a deadline and a shape, and the thing you need to know is not who is busy on Thursday but whether the whole thing is going to land.
Take a factory fit-out running from March to September. Every individual week of it can look fine on the planning boardPlanning boardThe main graphical scheduling surface where dispatchers drag tasks onto resources across a timeline.: people are booked, nothing clashes, the days are full. None of that tells you that the electrical phase has consumed two thirds of its budget with a third of the work done, that the commissioning engineer is committed to another project in August, or that the plan has drifted five weeks past what was agreed in February. Those are properties of the project as a whole, and no amount of looking at individual days reveals them.
Project planning is the layer that answers those questions.
How it relates to the planning board
It sits alongside the board, not on top of it. Work is still scheduled as appointmentsAppointmentA task scheduled to a resource for a specific period - the scheduled instance you see on the planning board. on resourcesResourceAn entity that can carry out work - a person, vehicle, tool, or room - that you schedule on the planning board., and the board is still where that happens.
What project planning adds is the structure above those appointments: a jobJobA high-level container, comparable to a project, that bundles related tasks together with common information such as customer, billing, and address. is a projectProjectA job seen as a whole in project planning: a body of work with a budget, a team, dependencies and a deadline. Its tasks are still planned as ordinary appointments on the board., its tasksTaskA unit of work that belongs to a job. It appears in the open task list until it is scheduled to a resource. are the work it breaks into, and the questions become aggregate ones. How much of this is planned. Who is on it. How much budget is left. Which tasks are in trouble.
The two directions stay connected. A task planned from the project ends up as an appointment on somebody's board, and progress reported on the board shows up in the project.
Who can see it
Projects is a module, so it appears only for users whose roleUser roleA named bundle of user actions assigned to users and user groups. Permissions flow through roles, never directly to a user. grants it:
| User action | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Projects | Open the projects pages at all |
| Manage projects | Create and change projects and their tasks |
| Record budget entry | Record budget used against a task |
The Time tab of a project additionally needs View timesheets. See roles and user actions.
In this section
Portfolio
See every project in flight and work out which ones need attention.
The project page
The tabs that make up a project, from its task breakdown to its board.
Team
Who is on a project, what they bring to it, and whether anybody is over-committed.
Progress & attention
Choose what counts as done, decide which tasks get flagged, and set what turns a project amber or red.
Budget & time
Track what a project has used against what it was given, and record budget as an append-only ledger.