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People Planner Overview

How to use the People Planner

Lyssa Parisella avatar
Written by Lyssa Parisella
Updated over a month ago

The People Planner lists all the people in your organization. It shows their availability and utilization over time.

The planner has been designed to help you find the right person to schedule for assignments based on how many hours they have available or their utilization rate.

🤓 How to read the People Planner?

The People Planner provides a Summary of allocation for each person to indicate whether a person is overbooked, underbooked, or at full capacity. uses a combination of numbers, colors, and percentages

Here's what the different colors mean:

  • Blue - Fully booked

  • Light blue - Has availability

  • Dark blue and red - Overbooked

  • Green - Has no scheduled assignments

Display Options

By clicking on the Display Options icon, you can change the unit of display on the Summary or Unit on Assignments.

Unit on Summary

  • Available Hours per day

  • Available Hours per week (the "week" here refers to a 5-day work week, which is Runn's default number of work days in a week)

  • Available FTE

  • Utilization %

Example: Available Hours per day

The People Planner shows your people's availability in hours by default. Here's an example with the assumption that a full work-day is 8 hours:

  • Alan is full. He has 8 hours of planned assignments.

  • Beyoncé is 2h over. She has 10 hours of planned assignments.

  • Bob has 4h free. He has 4 hours of planned assignments, and 4 hours of availability left.

  • Bon Jovi has 8h free. He has no planned assignments.

Example: Utilization Percentage %

If you would rather view your People's availability in percentages, you can choose Utilization % as the Summary Unit.

Weekly Summary

You can also toggle on the Weekly Summary view, which shows your people's availability or utilization rates per week.

When 'Hours per Day' is selected as the Unit of Summary, it is disabled by default.

When 'Hours per week' is selected as the Unit of Summary, it is enabled by default.

For other effort units, you can choose to enable or disable the weekly summary.

Group By

Group By lets you view your people on the planner based on their commonalities. The default grouping is "All" which shows everyone on the planner.

You can also group your people by their role, team, employment type, skills and people tags.

If you are grouping by a parameter and would like to expand all the groupings at once, you can click this icon to expand all:

How to view Utilization % by Team or Role?

By default, the group utilization toggle will be switched on. This enables Group Utilization charts.

When you use the Group By function on the planner, you can view high-level utilization charts for each group of people and placeholders.

Sort By

Sort By lets you sort the order of the people as they appear on the planner.

  • For people, choose from availability, alphabetical order of the first name, role, or team.

  • For placeholders, choose from project name or the placeholder's start date.

Note: The order of availability is determined by the total available hours in the visible period on the timeline. You can adjust the period and then refresh the availability by clicking on the refresh button.

➕ Adding a project to a person

To add a project to a person, expand the person, then click Assign Project.

You can choose any project and can change the person's role for that project from their default role.

🔎 Searching and filtering

Using the Search people... field, you can filter the people list by

  • person name

  • client name

  • project name

  • team name

  • tag

You can also use the star icon to see your favorite people. When you start a person, the person is starred only in your view but not other users.

For more information see Searching and filtering.

🫥 Placeholders

Expand on each placeholder to see what assignments have been planned and for what project.

For more information about placeholders, see Placeholders

Forecast your hiring needs on the People Planner

The Placeholder Grouping is a very useful tool for you to forecast your hiring needs. See Hiring Report - how to see my future hiring needs? to learn more.

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