How scheduling works
Plenar doesn’t guess your schedule and it doesn’t ask you to lay it out by hand. It recomputes your plan every time something changes. This page explains what Plenar does with your inputs, why the schedule looks the way it does, and what you can change to influence it.
Plenar in 30 seconds
You give Plenar tasks with estimates and dependencies, team members with availability and skills, and goals with target dates and priorities. It gives back:
Plenar weighs all your constraints and priorities at once to find the best plan it can. It doesn’t use round-robin or first-come-first-served.
Rules vs. preferences
This distinction is the key to understanding why your schedule looks the way it does.
Rules are always enforced. Plenar will never produce a schedule that breaks one. If two rules contradict each other, no valid schedule exists.
| Rule | What it means |
|---|---|
| Dependencies | Task B can’t start before Task A finishes |
| Availability | No work on weekends, time off, or holidays |
| Capacity | Each person’s day only holds so much work |
| Project start date | No work before this date |
Preferences are things Plenar tries to satisfy but will trade off when it has to. A schedule with some preferences unmet is still valid.
| Preference | What it means |
|---|---|
| Target dates | Plenar tries to hit them, but will still produce a plan when it can’t |
| Skill matching | Plenar prefers qualified people, but will assign anyone if it must |
| Load balance | Plenar spreads work evenly, but will lean on one person to hit a deadline |
| Stability | Plenar avoids moving imminent work, but will if the alternative is worse |
How priorities work
Deadlines come first. Everything else is secondary.
For your Must goals at P0, P1, and P2, Plenar looks at how many would miss their target date and by how much, and prefers plans that miss fewer. A P0 target date wins over all your P1 target dates; P1 wins over P2. P3 and P4 goals keep their target dates for your reference, but Plenar doesn’t actively plan around them.
Once it has done the best it can on deadlines, Plenar improves everything else: matching the right skills to each task, finishing the whole project sooner, keeping people busy without idle gaps, spreading work evenly, avoiding needless reshuffles, keeping the same assignees, and finishing milestones that are already in progress. A plan that hits one more deadline always wins, even if it makes the project slightly longer.
What kind of plan Plenar found
Every time it computes, Plenar shows the state of the result as a colored dot on the New Plan and Plan of Record panels. There are five:
- Computing — Plenar is still working out the plan.
- Feasible — a valid plan, though not provably the best. The normal result for most projects.
- Optimal — the best plan possible; no rearrangement can improve it.
- Partial — some work couldn’t fit, usually Nice tasks dropped or target dates missed under capacity pressure. Expect warnings.
- Infeasible — no valid plan exists; a rule contradicts another, like a circular dependency or an impossible assignment.
A common misread: Optimal doesn’t mean “every deadline met.” It means no better arrangement exists given your constraints. With three engineers, six months of work, and a three-month target date, the optimal plan still has late goals — it just means no staffing arrangement could do better. See Explore the sample project for these dots in context.
What resists moving
Plenar doesn’t treat every task the same when it decides what to shift:
- Tasks already in progress don’t move.
- Tasks starting soon strongly resist rescheduling — Plenar moves them only when the alternative is much worse.
- Tasks further out rearrange freely as things change.
This keeps the schedule from reshuffling imminent work every time someone tweaks an estimate. A setting controls how far out “starting soon” reaches — see Settings.
Assignment
Plenar assigns every unassigned task as it computes the plan — there’s no separate step to enable. It picks the member who best fits your constraints and priorities across the team. With Skill scheduling on, it prefers people who match a task’s required skills, falling back to a partial match, then anyone available (flagging the gap with a warning) rather than leaving the task unscheduled.
Assignments Plenar makes are Auto and may shift on later plans if a better fit appears; assignments you set yourself are Locked and stay put. See Skills and assignment for the details.
Why schedules change
Your plan is a function of your inputs — when they change, Plenar recomputes. Common triggers:
- Estimate revised — a task takes longer or shorter; downstream tasks shift.
- Task completed — dependent tasks can start; Plenar fills the freed capacity.
- Dependency added or removed — changes what can run in parallel.
- Availability changed — time off, sick leave, on-call; tasks on those days shift.
- Scope changed — tasks added, or Nice tasks dropped; Plenar re-balances.
- Priority changed — a goal becomes P0; Plenar reorganizes to hit that date.
Every change opens a New Plan preview first, so you always see what moves before committing. See Preview and apply.
Common questions
Does “Optimal” mean all my deadlines are met? No. It means no rearrangement could do better given your team and constraints. You can have an optimal plan that still misses target dates — that’s a signal you need more capacity or less scope, not a different schedule.
Why didn’t Plenar hit my target date? Target dates are preferences, not rules. If the work doesn’t fit the time and team available, Plenar produces the closest plan it can and flags the slip rather than refusing to schedule.
What’s the difference between a rule and a preference? A rule is never broken (a task can’t start before its dependency finishes). A preference is honored when possible and traded off when it conflicts with a deadline (load balance, skill matching).
What to do next
- Preview and apply — how every change is shown before it commits.
- How the plan learns — how execution feeds back and sharpens estimates.
- Goal health — how target dates and ETAs turn into On Track / At Risk / Off Track.