What are Tentative Projects?
Tentative projects are projects that you have not confirmed. You may be in discussion with your client about the project, or you may be waiting for the final sign-off to begin it. Runn lets you set a project status as either confirmed or tentative:
What are the benefits of setting up tentative projects?
With our powerful Scenario Toggle/ Tentative Toggle, you can:
Isolate tentative projects' effect on your team's workload and availability, so you can determine priorities and plan ahead of time
Perform what-if scenario planning with tentative projects, so you can see how different combinations of projects in your pipeline will affect your people's workload and availability
Example
In the example below, when the tentative toggle is turned on, the light blue bar on the chart represents the additional workload for the people based on the tentative projects:
Create a tentative project
When creating a new project, choose Tentative under the project status.
Set a Project as Tentative
To change an existing project's status, click on the three-dot menu next to the project on the Project Planner and select Set Tentative or Set Confirmed.
All tentative projects appear in the Project Planner with a light blue project timeline.
Turning off the blue Tentative Toggle of a project
Turning off the Tentative Toggle of a Project does not set it as a Confirmed Project. It only means that the People Planner and Charts will exclude the Project's workload in their calculations. Please follow the steps above to set a project as Confirmed or Tentative.
Scenario Toggle/ Tentative Toggle
The Scenario Toggle / Tentative Toggle (the Toggle) lets you include or exclude all workload added to tentative projects when calculating availability or utilization in the People Planner, in the Charts and all relevant metrics in Reports:
Learn more about how the Tentative Toggle works here.
What-if Scenarios:
Create and compare different scenarios in Runn
Scenario planning in resource management is about asking: “What happens to our people, projects, and capacity if something changes?” It helps teams compare possible futures before committing to hiring, sales, delivery dates, or project scope.
Here are some simple examples:
Scenario | Question you are testing | Possible decision |
A new project is won | Do we have enough people to deliver it? | Hire contractors or shift start date |
Only high-priority tentative projects are selected | Do we have the capacity to deliver all high-priority work? | Reshuffle project priorities |
Sales pipeline converts at 50% vs. 80% | How much capacity will we need? | Train, hire, or subcontract |
Create and Save a Scenario (Standard & Advanced Plan)
This is currently a beta feature available on request under the Standard and Advanced Plans. Please reach out to us via the in-app chatbox to request access if you are interested.
In Runn, you can select specific tentative projects and save them as a private scenario visible only to the creator. After creating multiple scenarios, you can easily compare their impact on availability.
In the example below, notice how the Engagement Manager's utilization % rises when switching from projects with a 90% chance of winning to 60%+ chance:
Learn more here: Scenario Planning: Create and Compare Saved Scenarios
For Lite/ Legacy customers, you can still compare planning options at a high level by turning tentative projects on or off individually, but you won’t be able to create, save, or revisit a full scenario. Learn more here:
Timesheets are disabled in Tentative Projects
As Tentative Projects are for planning purposes, you cannot log actual hours to a tentative project. You will see the Timesheet button greyed out in the Project Dashboard:
If your staff is actually working on the project, please set this project as Confirmed. Then the Timesheet function will be enabled.
Past assignments in Tentative Projects are excluded from Reports
As Tentative Projects is designed for future planning, any past assignments in a tentative project will not be calculated in the reports. Runn assumes that these hours did not materialize.
The metrics in the project dashboard will still include past assignments. In this case, you will observe a difference between the metrics in the Project Dashboard and the Project Report.
Example
Today is March 12th.
I set up a tentative project with the following scheduled assignments:
2 billable hours on Feb 14th (in the past)
3 billable hours on Apr 20th (in the future)
Billable Hours in the Project Dashboard
5 total billable hours will show up on the Project Performance Chart
Billable Hours in the Project Report
Since the past billable hours do not count, it will show only 3 billable hours. The project financials such as revenue, cost and profits are calculated based on future assignments only in the report.
Set as confirmed if needed
If you want the report to also reflect the past assignments, please set the project as confirmed.
Still have questions? We’re happy to help!