Invite Your Team
Plenar schedules work across your team’s actual capacity. The more accurately you model your team — their availability, their skills, their time off — the better the schedule reflects reality.
Adding members to your organization
- Go to Settings > Members in your organization
- Click Invite Member
- Enter their email address
Members belong to the organization and can be assigned to multiple projects.
Assigning members to a project
A member must be assigned to a project before Plenar can schedule work for them. Even if they are in your organization, they are invisible to Plenar until assigned.
- Open the project
- Go to Settings > Team
- Click Add Member and select from your organization roster
Skills
Skills matter when you enable auto-assignment. Without auto-assignment, Plenar uses whoever you assign to each task. With auto-assignment, skills help Plenar make intelligent assignment decisions.
Setting member skills
In project Settings > Team, click on a member to add skills. Skills are freeform strings — “React”, “API design”, “iOS” — defined at the project level.
How skills affect auto-assignment
Tasks can have required skills (hard constraints) and preferred skills (soft preferences):
| Mode | What happens when no member has all required skills |
|---|---|
| Required | The task is not scheduled. You get an error. Strict but safe — no one unqualified gets assigned. |
| Partial | Plenar assigns the best available member, even if they lack some skills. You get a warning, but the task is always scheduled. |
| Preferred | Same as Partial, plus Plenar optimizes for preferred skill matches as a tiebreaker. |
For most teams, Partial mode (the default) is the right choice. It ensures everything gets scheduled while surfacing skill gaps as warnings.
When skills matter most
Skills become important when you have:
- Specialized work — database migrations that only your DBA should touch, iOS tasks that need a Swift developer
- Large teams — with 8+ people, manual assignment becomes tedious. Let Plenar figure out who should do what based on skills and availability.
- Skill development goals — use preferred skills to nudge toward stretch assignments without making them mandatory
Availability
Every team member starts with Monday-Friday availability at full capacity. Plenar skips weekends automatically. To make the schedule accurate, you need to account for time off.
Time off types
Time off types are configured at the organization level. Each type defines how it affects capacity:
| Type | Typical capacity | Use for |
|---|---|---|
| PTO | 0% (full day off) | Vacation, personal days |
| Sick | 0% (full day off) | Sick leave |
| On-Call | 50% | Rotation shifts where the person is available but at reduced capacity |
| Conference | 0% (full day off) | Conferences, offsites, training |
Organizations can add custom types. Each type specifies whether the person has zero capacity or reduced capacity for those days.
Adding time off
From the dashboard: Go to the Availability view, select a member, and mark dates on the calendar.
From Claude Code: Ask naturally — “I’m taking PTO next Friday” or “Mark me as on-call the week of April 14th.” Claude calls plenar_add_time_off with the right dates and type.
How availability affects the schedule
Plenar converts task estimates from working days to calendar days using each member’s specific availability. Two people with the same 3-day task might end up with different calendar date ranges:
Alice (no time off): Monday-Wednesday Bob (PTO on Wednesday): Monday-Thursday (skips Wednesday)
Both tasks consume 3 working days, but Bob’s spans 4 calendar days. Plenar handles this automatically.
Capacity buffer
A global capacity buffer (default: 10%) inflates all estimates before scheduling. A 3-day task becomes 3.3 working days internally. This provides margin for estimation error without requiring you to pad individual estimates.
The buffer is configured in your project’s Settings > Scheduling Constraints. Increase it if your team consistently underestimates. Decrease it if your estimates are well-calibrated.
What to do next
- Manage Your Schedule — Learn the edit-preview-apply workflow
- Team Availability — Deep dive into time off, calendar sync, and capacity