Project Planning
Core concepts
Planning converts an approved request into a deliverable plan: tasks and subtasks, milestones, durations, planned hours, assignments, expenses, risks, and the business case. Most of this is defined once in a project template and reused, so know what a template carries (tasks, predecessors, assignments, custom forms, queue details, sharing, approval processes) versus what is project-specific.
Understand the money model: planned cost comes from task planned hours × cost rates plus expenses and fixed costs; planned revenue comes from planned hours × billing rates or fixed revenue. Planned hours on a task are the input the Resource Planner later consumes.
Project Schedule From (Start Date vs Completion Date) determines which date you edit and how tasks default their scheduling mode. Duration type on each task decides whether changing assignees or hours recalculates duration or work.
Traps
- Milestones are not tasks; they attach to tasks and consume no duration.
- Parent task percent complete rolls up from children and is not directly editable.
- Planned hours and duration are different units - a 5-day task can hold 10 planned hours.
- Editing a template after project creation changes nothing on existing projects.
- A project in Planning status behaves differently from Current for notifications and queue availability.
Worked example
A task with 5-day duration, two assignees at 100% allocation, 8-hour days, Simple duration type: planned hours = 5 × 8 × 2 = 80. Those 80 hours are what the Resource Planner budgets; the 5 days are what scheduling and the critical path use. Mixing the two is the most common planning error in scenarios.