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 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.
Tentative Toggle
The Tentative Toggle lets you include or exclude workload added to tentative projects when calculating availability or utilization in the People Planner, in the Charts and all relevant metrics in Reports
When turned on, both the workload of all tentative projects are included when calculating the availability/ utilization. The tentative projects are also visible on the Project Planner and Reports
When turned off, the availability/ utilization displayed will only factor in all the workload added to all confirmed projects. The tentative projects are hidden on the Project Planner and Reports
Display the effects of tentative projects on people's availability on the People Planner
In the example below, when the Tentative Toggle is turned off, the Design Team's availability increases.
When the Tentative Toggle is turned on, they are less available as the workload in the tentative project is included in the availability calculation:
Display the effects of tentative projects in Charts on the Project Planner
When you turn on Chart and Tentative Toggle, all tentative projects' workload will be included in the Chart's calculation:
See real-time updates as you change the scheduled hours
With the chart open, you will see a real-time update on people's workload/availability/ utilization when you change the workload of tentative projects on the Project Planner:
⚡ Pro Tip: We recommend keeping the Tentative Toggle on most of the time, so all tentative projects are visible in the Project Planner. Turn the Tentative Toggle off only when you just want to focus on the confirmed projects.
Scenario Planning: Display the effects of only selected tentative projects
If you only want to include or exclude the workload of specific tentative projects for scenario planning purposes, you can customize which tentative projects to include or exclude. This is useful when you are doing scenario planning.
Different combinations of tentative projects let you see the impact of different scenarios. Runn recalculates your team's workload in the People Planner and Charts to help you determine how the new work will best fit within your team.
Here are 3 ways to customize which tentative projects' workload to include or exclude:
1. Tentative Toggle Drop-down menu
Click on the grey arrow next to the Tentative Toggle
Turn on or off the toggle on the search bar to select or deselect all tentative projects
Type the project name in the search bar to search for the tentative project
Turn on or off the toggle next to each project to include or exclude the project in the calculations.
If a tentative project is excluded but other tentative projects are included, the excluded project will be grayed out in the Project Planner:
2. Tentative Toggle under Project Name on Project Planner
Turn on the Tentative Toggle at the top of the Project Planner
All tentative projects are now visible
Turn on or off the Tentative Toggle under each tentative project to include or exclude its workload from the Charts or People Planner calculations:
3. Tentative Toggle next to Project Name on People Planner
Turn on the Tentative Toggle at the top of the People Planner
All tentative projects are now visible when you expand a person
Turn on or off the Tentative Toggle next to each tentative project's name to include or exclude its workload from the Charts or People Planner calculations:
Note that this will include or exclude all of the tentative project's workload for all people in the project from the calculations. Only including or excluding a specific person's workload in a project is not supported at the moment.
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 Project 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!