Define — sizes, skills, people and hires
What this page is — The Define tab, the first tab of Planning. It holds what a plan is made of before anything is assigned: the size scale, the skills the project plans with and who has them, each person's hours per week, and the planned hires. What it is for — Setting up a project for planning once, and keeping it right as the team changes, without hunting through Project settings, member profiles and the Capacity tab. The problem it solves — Before Define, these facts lived on four different screens, and a planner discovered a wrong size scale or a missing skill halfway through a planning meeting. Define puts them on one page, next to the plan that uses them.
Route: /org/tasks/planning?tab=define · Permissions: View planning (read), Manage planning (change anything on the tab)
Module: Planning · Entry points: Planning → Define (first tab) · Quick create → Planned hire also opens the hire dialog used here
1. What Define is — and what it is not
Define edits live project configuration, not a scenario. Everything on it is saved for the whole project the moment you press a Save button, and every scenario — drafts and future ones — reads the new values. That is why the tab carries no scenario switcher, no drift badge and no Commit: there is nothing to commit here.
Each section writes to the record that already owns the data, so nothing is copied:
| Section | What it holds | Where it is stored |
|---|---|---|
| Sizes | The size scale: each size's name, points and hours | Project → Settings → Planning (the same scale shown there) |
| Skills | The project's skill list, and for each member which skills they have, at which level, and the one they are planned as | The project's member skill records (the same ones the AI planning assistants read) |
| People | Hours per week per member on this project | The member capacity record Capacity computes from |
| Planned hires | Placeholder people the project plans on before they exist | The organisation's planned hires, linked to this project |
2. Why you would use it
- Sizes that mean something. Dropping a card on a size on the Plan tab (Plan by Size) gives it that size's points; the hours follow from the scale unless someone typed their own. A wrong scale makes every capacity figure wrong.
- Plan by what people actually do. Plan by Resource on the Plan tab shows each person's column with the skill they are planned as under their name, and Suggest with AI reads skills and levels when it matches tasks to people.
- Honest capacity for part-timers. A member on the project 20 hours a week gets half the net hours of a full-timer in every sprint.
- Plan before you hire. A planned hire carries load and capacity like anyone else, so the plan shows the gap the hire is meant to close.
3. How it fits together
4. Using Define — step by step
Step 1 · Set the size scale
Sizes shows a table of Size, Points, Min h, Max h and Default h, and above it the project's estimation unit (story points, hours or days, set in Project settings → Planning). On a project that plans in days the columns read Min d · Max d · Default d, the Points column is hidden, and the line above says how long a day is (a day is 8h); you type days and the platform stores the hours underneath. Change a value, Add a size for another row, or remove a row with the bin icon; nothing is saved until you press Save sizes.
Hour ranges. Give a size a minimum and a maximum and its Default h becomes the middle of that range (for example M 5.5–12h → 8.75h). Then sizes and hours follow each other:
- a task given a size — dropped on a size on the Plan tab — gets that size's default hours;
- a task whose hours are typed or changed while its size is left alone — on a planning card, or later in Tasks — moves to the size whose range holds them (20h with L at 12.5–24h → L). Hours below the smallest range count as the smallest size, above the largest as the largest, and hours in a gap between two ranges as the size above the gap;
- a size changed in the same edit as the hours wins, and brings its default hours.
Suggest ranges fills every size's minimum and maximum from the current defaults — each size runs from halfway to the size below to halfway to the size above, the smallest from 0 — and leaves the largest size open-ended: its maximum stays empty and reads and above, so any estimate bigger than its minimum counts as that size, and its default stays what you type. Review the suggestion, then Save sizes.
A size has both ends or neither — except the largest, which may have only a minimum. A size without a range keeps a fixed default and nothing is re-sized from hours until at least one size has a range. Ranges must go up with the sizes and must not overlap; the tab says what is wrong before you save. A project that uses a fixed hours per point has no ranges. The toast reads Saved — The project plans with these from now on. A size name holds up to 12 characters, so keep them short: XS, S, M, L, XL.
Step 2 · List the skills and say who has them
Skills starts with the project's skill list as chips. Type a new skill in Add a skill… and press Enter; remove one with its ×. Save the list with Save skill list.
Below the list is one row per project member. For each member:
- Add a skill… offers the list's skills the member does not have yet.
- Each skill has a level: Can help (has done some of this with support), Competent (can take this work on their own) or Leads on it (the person others ask).
- The star beside a skill (Plan them as this) makes it the member's primary skill. A member has exactly one primary skill per project: starring another skill moves the star, and the row shows a Planned as chip with it.
Member skills save as you change them. Planned hires are listed after the members with a dashed border and a Planned hire chip; their skills belong to the hire, so Edit skills opens the hire dialog.
Step 3 · Set hours per week
People lists each member with an hours-per-week box — a days-per-week box (0–7) on a project that plans in days. Leave a box empty to use the project default. Press Save hours (Save days); the toast says Capacity uses the new hours on the next recompute — open Capacity on a draft scenario and press Recompute to see the effect. Planned hires are listed underneath with their own hours, which are part of the hire.
Step 4 · Add the planned hires
Planned hires lists the hires linked to this project with their role, hours per week, status and Planned as skill. Add planned hire opens the same dialog described in Capacity and planned hires: name, role, skills with one primary, hours per week, holiday zone, availability window and the projects that may plan on the hire. An empty list reads Add one to plan work for a role you are still hiring for.
Step 5 · Add the contractors and check the rates
These two sections appear only when the project's Value mode is Per task amount (Settings).
Contractors lists the outsourced crews planned on this project. Add contractor picks one of the project's vendors (Project → Vendors), and gives it a day rate, days per week and a trade. A contractor then behaves like a planned hire — it carries load and capacity and tasks are planned on it — with two differences: its day rate values those tasks, and it is never assigned to one. Adding the same vendor twice returns the contractor that already exists rather than a duplicate, and "Replace with a real user" is refused for one: there is nobody to hand a company's work to. Its name follows its CRM vendor, so the two never read differently.
Rates is the day rate behind every Rate-based value, in one table: members (set in Project → Billing), planned hires and contractors (set on the resource itself). A resource quoting another currency is called out — it cannot value a task until it has a rate in the project's currency.
5. Field reference
| Field | Section | Type | Rules |
|---|---|---|---|
| Size | Sizes | Text | Up to 12 characters; one row per size |
| Points | Sizes | Number, steps of 0.5 | 0 or more |
| Min h · Max h | Sizes | Numbers, steps of 0.5 | Both or neither (the largest size may leave Max empty: and above); min ≤ max; no overlap with the neighbouring sizes |
| Default h | Sizes | Number, steps of 0.5 | The middle of the range when one is set (read-only), else typed; given to a task that gets the size |
| Skill (project list) | Skills | Text chip | Up to 60 characters; duplicates ignored regardless of case |
| Member skill | Skills | Select from the project list | A member cannot hold the same skill twice |
| Level | Skills | Select | Can help · Competent · Leads on it (default Competent) |
| Primary (★) | Skills | Toggle | One per member per project; the first skill added becomes primary |
| Hours per week | People | Number (days per week, 0–7, on a days project) | Empty means the project default; stored as hours per week either way |
| Planned hire | Planned hires | Dialog | See Capacity and planned hires |
| Day rate | Planned hires · Contractors | Number, clearable | What a day of this resource costs; values a task planned on it (value mode only) |
| Contractor | Contractors | Dialog — vendor, day rate, days per week, trade | A CRM vendor planned as a resource; one contractor per vendor |
6. Worked example
A project lead prepares Mobile Wallet for its first planning meeting. In Sizes she changes M from 6 to 8 hours and adds XL at 13 points / 32 hours, then presses Save sizes. In Skills she adds iOS and QA to the project list and saves it. Ravi has Android (Leads on it) and iOS (Can help); she stars Android. Meera gets QA as Competent and it becomes her primary automatically, because it is her only skill. In People she types 20 for Meera, who splits her week with another project, and saves. Finally she presses Add planned hire, creates iOS hire #1 with iOS as primary skill and 40 hours a week, available from 1 November. On the Plan tab, grouped by Resource, the column headers now read Ravi with Android underneath, Meera with QA, and iOS hire #1 with Planned hire · iOS; on Capacity, Meera's cells are half of Ravi's.
7. The admin contract
- View planning shows the tab read-only: values are visible, inputs are disabled and no Save buttons appear.
- Manage planning changes everything on the tab. Because Define is live configuration, a change affects every scenario of the project at once — grant it to the people who own the project's planning.
- The size scale and estimation unit are the same values as Project → Settings → Planning; changing them in either place changes both. See Settings.
- Planned hires are organisation-wide records; a hire linked to several projects shows on each of them.
8. Don't confuse this with…
- Capacity — net hours per person per time box of a scenario, with overrides. Define holds the inputs (hours per week, hires); Capacity holds the scenario's result.
- Settings — estimation unit, date rules, focus factor and commit rules. The size scale appears in both places.
- Member profiles — a person's organisation-wide details; the skills on Define are what this project plans them as.
9. Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Inputs are grey and there is no Save button | You have View planning but not Manage planning | Ask for Manage planning |
| This project has no members yet. | Nobody is a member of the project | Add members on the project first |
| A skill is not offered in a member's Add a skill… | It is not on the project's skill list, or the member already has it | Add it to the list and press Save skill list |
| Capacity did not change after new hours | Capacity is computed per scenario | Open Capacity on the draft and press Recompute |
| Typed hours do not change a task's size | No size has an hour range yet | Give the sizes Min h and Max h and press Save sizes |
| Save sizes is disabled with a red line | A range is half filled, upside down, or overlaps its neighbour | Fix the range the line names |
| Plan by Resource shows no skill for a person | The member has no primary skill | Star one of their skills |
| A hire is missing from the list | The hire is not linked to this project, or it was cancelled | Edit the hire and tick this project, or use Link existing hire on Capacity |