Runn doesn’t use a traditional parent-child project hierarchy. Instead, you can use Clients, Teams, Custom Fields or Workstreams to organize projects and work in ways that support capacity planning.
The best option depends on what you want to analyze:
If you want to analyze... | Use... |
People demand across a client | |
People capacity and utilization by organizational group | |
People demand across multiple projects within a business category | |
People capacity by another people attribute | |
People demand by type of work |
🌟 The best approach depends on what you want to understand about your people capacity.
What are you trying to answer?
Project organization can help you answer questions such as:
How much people capacity is required across a portfolio or business area?
Which projects are driving demand for a particular role or team?
Where are people becoming over-allocated?
How would delaying a group of projects affect capacity?
How much capacity is being consumed by different types of work?
✅ Use Custom Fields to group projects
Use Custom Fields when you want to categorize projects by a higher-level business category, such as:
Portfolio
Business unit
Department
Product area
Program
Engagement
Region
If you have multiple projects that belong to the same business category, use a Project Custom Field to associate them with that category.
For example, you might assign projects the following values:
Project Name | Portfolio (custom field) | Business Unit (custom field) |
Website Redesign | Digital Transformation | Marketing |
Mobile App | Digital Transformation | Product |
Data Platform | Technology Modernization | Engineering |
This allows you to filter and analyze project demand according to these categories created through custom fields.
💡 Use Custom Fields when the question is:
↳ “Where is our capacity being consumed?”
✅ Use Workstreams to organize the work within projects
Use Workstreams when you want to understand the type of work people are performing across projects.
For example:
Website Redesign - Project
↳ Discovery (workstream #1)
↳ Design (workstream #2)
↳ Development (workstream #3)
↳ QA (workstream #4)
Workstreams provide a way to group related activities across projects, helping you understand demand for different types of work across your organization.
💡 Use Workstreams when the question is:
↳ “What type of work is consuming our capacity?”
🔀 Combine both for broader capacity planning
Custom Fields and Workstreams can be used together.
For example:
Portfolio: Digital Transformation (custom field)
↳ Project: Website Redesign
↳ Design (workstream)
↳ Development (workstream)
Project: Mobile App
↳ Design (workstream)
↳ Engineering (workstream)
The Custom Field provides the business grouping, while the Workstream provides the work grouping.
Together, they help you understand both:
Where is demand coming from? and What type of capacity does that demand require?
Organize & Analyze your work for capacity planning
If you're looking to set up “project hierarchy,” first identify what you need the hierarchy to accomplish.
If you need to group projects for reporting or analysis, Custom Fields may be sufficient.
If you need to break project assignments into different types of work, use Workstreams.
If you need to compare project demand with available people capacity, use Custom Fields or Workstreams to organize your projects and work, then use the People Planner, Capacity Dashboard, or Reports to analyze your data.
⚽️ The Goal
The purpose isn't simply to create a project hierarchy.
The goal is to make project demand easier to analyze against available people capacity.
Organize your projects and work so you can understand where capacity is being consumed, identify potential gaps and make better decisions about your future workload.