Managing projects in Runn follows a clear lifecycle: planning before work begins, actively managing delivery, and wrapping up once the project is complete. This guide walks through each stage.
⚙️ Initial Setup
Before diving into project work, take a few steps to stay informed and collaborate effectively.
🔔 Follow your projects to receive notifications
Follow projects to receive notifications and stay up to date on changes in project team members and time off's impact on your project schedule.
👉 Learn more about how to follow your projects
💬 Collaborate using Project Notes
Use Project Notes to communicate with other users:
@mention teammates to notify them directly
Keep conversations and decisions tied to the project
👉 Learn more about Project Notes
🧩 1. Before the Project Starts
🛠️ Create a tentative project
Start by creating a project with a tentative status before the project starts.
From the planner, click New in the top-left
Select Project
(Optional) Tick Use Template and select the project template if you would like to apply a project template to the project
Set the Project Status as Tentative
Click Create
👉 Learn about all the Project Details fields: Project Details
💰 Set estimates and budget (optional)
Add the budgeted hours and revenue to the project, so you know how many hours of work you can schedule and stay within budget. Think about:
What roles or skills are needed to complete the project?
How many hours are required per role or phase to finish the project?
What project rates should I use?
To add or edit the project budget:
From the Project Planner > Identify your project (Turn on the tentative toggle on the Planner to view tentative projects)
Click on the 3-dot icon next to the project name
Select Edit Budget
👉 Step-by-step guide to set up budget by roles
👉 Learn about setting up the project budgets under different budget methods: Setting up Project Budget
Once the Project Budget is set up, you can view the Project Dashboard in Hours or Days to see how many hours your budget covers for the overall project and for each role.
In the example below, we set up a project in which we estimated we needed 300h of project management, 100h of UI Design, and 500h of UX Design.
🗓️ Build out Your Project Schedule
Start planning your projects by adding phases, milestones, placeholders (or people) and schedule assignments from the Project Planner:
👉 Learn more about scheduling a project.
🚀 2. Managing the Project
Once the project is underway, your focus shifts to tracking progress, adjusting plans, and keeping everything on track.
📊 Monitor project performance
Keep track of the budget tracker on the Project Planner to check if your forecast hours (past actual + future scheduled) is within budget:
Click on the 3-dot icon next to the Project Name > Select Open Dashboard to:
Monitor project revenue, cost and budget remaining
Phase-based metrics
View timesheets and scheduled vs actual hours comparison
Track activity log
👉 Learn more about Project Dashboard
🔥 Keep track of overallocation of project team members
Be mindful of any red lines over their assignments- this means the person is over 100% utilization during that period:
Click on the person's name to view their full schedule and other projects they are allocated to:
Discuss with relevant stakeholders to determine which project takes priority.
To view all the work of your project team members at a glance:
Click People at the top navigation menu
Change the grouping to All:
Click Filter > Project > Project Name to view the overall availability summary of each of your team members
Turn on Chart to visualize the workload vs capacity of your project team in the future:
🔄 Adjust the plan as needed
Projects rarely go exactly as planned. In Runn, you can:
Reschedule projects by adjusting timelines and assignments
Pause projects if work needs to temporarily stop
Transfer future work to another person or a placeholder if the existing team member suddenly becomes unavailable
📈 Use reports and insights
View Project Reports to view your project's metrics (e.g. total hours and financials)
Visualize Actual vs Scheduled hours comparison from the Performance Insights Dashboard
✅ 3. After the Project Closes
Once delivery is complete, there are a few key steps to properly close out the project.
🔍 Finalize and review reporting
Review final reports to understand:
Budget vs. actuals
Team utilization
Overall project performance
🗂️ Archive the project
Archive completed projects to:
Keep the Project Planner clean
Preserve historical data for reporting and analysis
From the Project Planner > Identify your project (Turn on the tentative toggle on the Planner to view tentative projects)
Click on the 3-dot icon next to the project name
Select Archive
Archived projects remain accessible from Manage > Projects, but won’t clutter your active planning views.
👉 Learn more about archiving/ unarchiving projects.