Skills and Assignment
Skills let you tell Plenar which team members are qualified for which tasks. Combined with auto-assignment, Plenar matches the right person to each task based on skills, availability, and workload.
Defining skills
Skills are defined at the organization or project level. Examples: “Frontend”, “Backend”, “DevOps”, “Design”, “Security”, “Data Engineering”.
To define skills:
- Go to project settings
- Open the skills configuration
- Add skill types with descriptive names
Skills are binary — a team member either has a skill or does not. There are no proficiency levels.
Assigning skills to team members
Once skills are defined, assign them to members:
- Open the team or members panel in project settings
- Select a team member
- Check the skills they possess
A member can have any number of skills. A member with no skills can still be assigned to tasks that have no skill requirements.
Task skill requirements
Each task can optionally list required skills. When a task requires “Backend” and “Security”, Plenar looks for team members who have both skills.
Set skill requirements:
- Dashboard: Open the task detail panel, add required skills
- Claude Code: Include skill requirements when creating tasks via
plenar_create_planorplenar_add_tasks
Auto-assignment
When auto-assignment is enabled in project settings, Plenar assigns unassigned tasks to team members automatically. The assignment considers:
- Skill match — Members with the required skills are preferred
- Availability — Members with more available capacity are preferred
- Workload balance — Work is distributed to avoid overloading one person
Without auto-assignment, unassigned tasks are not scheduled. You must manually assign every task.
Enable auto-assignment in Settings under scheduling constraints.
Assignment modes
Two modes control how Plenar handles auto-assigned tasks across schedule runs:
Stable mode (default)
Auto-assigned tasks keep their assignee across schedule recomputes. Once Plenar assigns Alice to a task, Alice stays assigned even if a recompute runs.
When to use: Normal day-to-day operations. Stable mode minimizes churn — your team does not wake up to reassigned work every time the schedule updates.
Fresh mode
Plenar re-evaluates all auto-assigned tasks from scratch on every recompute. Manually assigned tasks are never affected.
When to use:
- A new team member joins the project — Fresh mode lets Plenar redistribute work to include them
- Major scope changes — after adding or removing many tasks, a fresh pass finds better assignments
- Team reorganization — after changing who is on the project
Switch between modes in project settings. The change goes through the change impact preview, so you see the reassignment impact before committing.
Skill matching modes
Three levels of strictness for skill-based scheduling:
| Mode | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Required | Tasks with skill requirements are only assigned to members who have all required skills. If no match exists, the task is not scheduled and a warning is raised. |
| Partial | Plenar always schedules the task, but prefers members with matching skills. If no member has the skills, the best available member is assigned. |
| Preferred | Like Partial, but also optimizes for preferred skill matches as a secondary objective. |
Configure the skill matching mode in project settings under scheduling constraints.
What happens when no one matches
If a task requires skills that no assigned team member has:
- Required mode: The task is not scheduled. An error or warning appears.
- Partial / Preferred mode: Plenar assigns the best available member anyway and raises a warning that the skill match is imperfect.
To resolve: add a qualified member to the project, remove the skill requirement, or manually assign someone.
See Warnings and Conflicts for details on skill-related warnings.
Best practices
Start simple. Define 3-5 broad skill categories. You can always add more later. Too many skills creates rigid assignments with little benefit.
Use auto-assignment by default. Manually assigning every task is tedious and produces worse schedules. Let Plenar optimize, then override the few assignments that need a specific person.
Use Stable mode for routine work, Fresh for resets. Switch to Fresh after a significant team or scope change, then switch back to Stable.
Do not over-constrain. If most of your team can do most tasks, adding skill requirements on every task adds complexity without improving the schedule. Reserve skill requirements for genuinely specialized work.
See Team Management for adding members and configuring capacity. See Settings for all scheduling constraint options.