How the scheduler works

When you generate a schedule for plan, Workable tries to create the best possible plan for the time window and people available in your organization.

It looks across the whole plan, tries to satisfy the most important work first, and balances work stream requirements, people capability, timing, and availability. The more clearly you define those inputs, the more useful the generated schedule will be.

It aims to:

Place work streams in the plan into the available planning periods
Respect the rules you configured for each work stream
Assign people who meet the required skills, and any required people or teams
Keep staffing realistic based on availability and holidays (if used)
Prioritize higher-ranked work streams when resources are limited

If everything cannot fit, the scheduler will usually favor the work streams that are higher in the priority order and leave lower-priority work streams unscheduled.

The scheduler explores many possible combinations of:

which work streams to include
when each included work stream should start
how long each included work stream should run
which people should be assigned

It then looks for combinations that satisfy the plan’s constraints. This means the scheduler is not filling work streams one by one from top to bottom. It evaluates the plan as a whole: one decision can affect the feasibility of many others.

Constraints

A constraint is a rule the scheduler should not break. Common examples include:

A work stream requires specific team size (number of participants)
A work stream requires certain skills
A required person (or team of people) must be included
A person cannot be committed to overlapping work beyond what the plan allows
A person cannot be committed during periods where they are unavailable
A work stream can only run for one of its allowed durations

Some constraints are effectively mandatory. If they cannot all be satisfied together, the scheduler may leave a work stream out of the schedule, or notify you that the plan is infeasible.

Priorities

Priority is one of the strongest signals in the plan.

If you have more demand than capacity, the scheduler will generally try to protect the higher-priority work streams first. Lower-priority work streams may be delayed, shortened within their allowed options, or left unscheduled if there is not enough qualified capacity remaining.

This is why the order of work streams in the plan matters. Moving a work stream higher can change what gets scheduled across the entire plan.

See Work stream priority for how to change work stream priorities in a plan.

Skills

Skill requirements tell the scheduler what kind of people a work stream needs. In broad terms, the scheduler:

checks whether the organization has people with the required skills
considers when those skills are needed
tries to assign people who match the required capability
avoids assigning people where the fit is clearly wrong when a better fit exists

If you use specific periods for a skill requirement, the scheduler treats that as timing information about when that capability matters within the work stream, not just whether the work stream needs that skill at all.

People

Each person is treated as a limited resource. The scheduler considers:

whether the person is active
what skills they have
whether they are required in a work stream
whether they belong to a required team
whether they are already committed elsewhere in the same periods
whether they are unavailable because of holidays or scheduled time off

The goal is to create committed assignments that are feasible across the full plan, not just on one work stream in isolation.

Required people, required teams, and consultants

These assignment types are treated differently:

Required people are hard commitments. If you require someone in a work stream, the scheduler must work around that choice.
Required teams are expanded into their members and treated similarly to fixed work stream requirements.
Consultants provide visibility and context, but they are not counted as committed delivery capacity for team-size validation or core staffing requirements.

Holidays and availability

If holiday options are enabled, the scheduler treats those periods as unavailable for committed work for relevant people. This can change:

when a work stream can start
whether a work stream can run continuously
whether enough qualified people exist in a given period
whether a work stream can be scheduled at all

This is one reason a work stream that looks feasible in a simple headcount review may still fail to schedule in practice.

What “best possible” means in practice

The scheduler is trying to find a strong overall plan, not just satisfy one rule at a time. In practice, that usually means it prefers outcomes that:

schedule more important work streams
respect configured constraints
use qualified people where they are needed
avoid obvious assignment conflicts
keep work streams reasonably coherent over time

Two important consequences follow from this:

A valid schedule will not always be the same as the schedule you expected.
Changing one work stream can change the schedule for many others.

Why work streams can remain unscheduled

A work stream may remain unscheduled for several different reasons:

Higher-priority work streams consumed the available people first
The required skills do not exist in the organization
The work stream needs more people than are available
Required assignments created conflicts
Holidays or time off reduced or removed critical availability
The work stream’s duration and staffing rules leave too little flexibility

When this happens, Workable provides specific feedback about each work stream that could not be scheduled:

Scheduler feedback

An unscheduled work stream does not always mean the plan is broken. Sometimes it means the scheduler made a tradeoff in favor of higher-priority work.

Why a plan can become “infeasible”

Sometimes there is no valid way to satisfy the required constraints. This can happen when, for example:

the same person is required on conflicting work
a required skill is unavailable in the periods where it is needed
team-size rules and skill requirements cannot be satisfied together
time-off rules remove too much capacity

When this happens, Workable provides validation or scheduling feedback so you can identify the constraint that needs to change.

For the best results

The scheduler works best when it has accurate inputs and some room to make tradeoffs. You will usually get better schedules when you:

keep work stream priorities intentional and up to date
define skill requirements clearly
use required people and team assignments only when they are truly necessary
keep people skills and holiday data accurate
give work streams realistic duration and team-size settings
use scenarios to compare alternative setups before changing your baseline

For information about possible validation and scheduling issues, see Troubleshooting schedules.