Preview & Apply
Every change in Plenar goes through a change impact preview before it affects your plan. This page explains how previews work and why they exist.
Why previews exist
In a continuously recomputed plan, a single change can cascade. Updating one task’s estimate might push three other tasks later, which slips a goal deadline, which triggers a reprioritization of work across the team. Without previews, you would not know any of this until after the fact.
The change impact preview guarantees: you always see what moves and why before committing.
How a preview works
Every edit triggers a two-pass recomputation:
Pass 1: Baseline
Plenar recomputes the current plan with no changes applied. This establishes what the plan looks like right now.
Pass 2: Modified
Your changes are applied in memory. Tasks that are not affected by your changes are anchored to their baseline positions. Only tasks directly or transitively impacted by your changes are freed for re-optimization.
The diff
Plenar compares the modified schedule against the baseline and produces a diff:
- Moved items — tasks that shifted dates, with the delta in days
- Assignment changes — tasks that moved to a different team member
- Goal impact — goals whose ETAs changed, with slip or gain and on-track/off-track status
- Milestone impact — milestones whose ETAs changed
- Quality comparison — whether the proposed schedule is better, worse, or equivalent
What “affected” means
Not every task is re-evaluated on every change. Plenar computes which tasks are affected:
- Direct — tasks changed by your edits (e.g., you edited the estimate)
- Availability cascade — tasks assigned to members whose availability changed
- Transitive dependents — all downstream tasks in the dependency chain
- Goal risk expansion — if a goal is at risk, all its pending tasks are freed for rescheduling
Non-affected tasks stay exactly where they are. This minimizes schedule noise — a small change produces a small diff.
Quality tiers
The preview assesses whether the proposed schedule is better than the current one. Quality is measured in four tiers, compared in strict order:
Tier 1 — Goal Compliance (highest priority) How many goals are late, and how late. An improvement here always wins, regardless of lower tiers.
Tier 2 — Skill Compliance How well auto-assigned tasks match required and preferred skills.
Tier 3 — Efficiency Total project duration, utilization, load balance.
Tier 4 — Stability (informational only) How many tasks moved and by how much. Does not affect the quality verdict.
A schedule that meets one more deadline is always preferred, even if it makes the project slightly longer overall.
When a change makes things worse
Sometimes your proposed change genuinely worsens the plan — there is no way to absorb it without pushing deadlines. When this happens, Plenar automatically explores alternative arrangements, giving itself more freedom to rearrange work.
If no better arrangement exists, Plenar tells you the current plan is already the best possible given your constraints. You can still apply the change (the data change is valid), but you will see the regression clearly in the change impact preview.
Apply and discard
Apply — saves all pending changes and promotes the preview to the new plan of record. After applying, a background optimization runs to check if a slightly better arrangement exists.
Discard — removes all pending changes. The plan of record is unchanged.
You can stack multiple changes (edit three estimates, reassign two tasks, add a dependency) and apply or discard them as a batch. There is no partial apply.
Background optimization
After you apply changes, Plenar automatically runs a deeper optimization pass. If it finds an arrangement that strictly improves some quality tier without regressing any higher tier, it updates the plan of record. If not, it discards the result.
Background optimization is automatic and conservative — it only helps, never hurts. You do not need to do anything.
Plan of Record
The plan of record (POR) is the currently active, committed plan — the shareable version that clients, execs, and teammates all see:
- Every task’s scheduled dates come from the POR
- Goal and milestone ETAs come from the POR
- The timeline visualization shows the POR
The POR updates only when you apply changes (or when background optimization finds a strict improvement). Between applies, it is stable.