Create a plan

A Plan is the top-level container for the activities and people you want to schedule. It defines the planning window, the time unit you want to work in, people and skill requirements, and the settings the scheduler should use.

When ready, Workable to generate an optimal schedule for the work items in the plan, considering the people, skills, timeframes, and more in the plan.

View all plans

Select Plans in the top navigation bar. Plans are displayed in Card or Table view. Use the view buttons to switch between them. You can also filter plans by plan type:

Tip

If you don’t have any plans yet load the Sample data to explore how plans are configured, and quickly generate an optimal schedule

Create a new plan

Click the New plan button. A new, untitled plan is opened to the Settings and projects tab.

1. Set the short Plan name - e.g., “Sprint 17” or “Maintenance schedule”
2. Set the Format - see Plan Formats below
3. Set the Duration length and units. These are suggested by default based on the plan format, but can be modified. Individual work items in the plan (such as Projects, Bets, or User Stories) can have different durations within the overall plan timeframe.
4. Set the Start date. The End date will be automatically calculated. If the plan format is Hourly planner, this will change to Start time, and the End date will be calculated based on the number of hours set in the Duration.
5. If the plan format is Minutes planner an additional field to set the Interval (mins) will be displayed. This allows you to divide an overall plan into discrete time segments. For example, a plan might have an overall duration of 360 minutes with 15 minute intervals for scheduling tasks to people.
6. Expand the Holiday policies section to configure holiday-related scheduling options - see Holiday options
7. Expand the Description section to add a longer description for the plan

When ready, click Save. The right-hand panel will update to show the list of work items in the current plan (empty for a new plan):

Tip

Displayed dates and times will match your browser’s current language format. Where that cannot be determined it will display the format for the language set in Settings ➔ Display.

Note

You cannot change the plan Format after a plan is saved.

Plan formats

There are four pre-built plan templates that make it easy to quickly configure a plan based on common working scenarios. Each template will label the work streams inside the plan differently:

Plan type	Use	Work-streams in the plan
Project Management	Traditional project scheduling with flexible timelines. Good for waterfall, general projects, or general task work.	Projects
Agile	Sprint-based weekly planning for iterative development	User stories
Shape Up	Cycles with fixed time boxes and variable scope	Bets
Hourly planner	Plans with tasks scheduled to hourly time segments	Tasks
Minute planner	Plans with tasks scheduled to custom minute interval segments	Tasks

Regardless of the format selected, Workable uses a consistent scheduler that ensures the actual schedule is driven by the plan’s overall duration; holiday policies; and each work stream’s specific duration and people constraints.

Duplicate a plan

The Duplicate button at the bottom of the Plan settings panel creates a copy of the current plan as a new, untitled plan. This makes it easy and fast to set up new plans for common schedules, like Agile Sprints in software engineering: