Scenario Planning enables teams to view project timelines alongside capacity, and explore what-if scenarios without impacting live plans. You can easily shift resources, change timelines, and adjust allocations to compare your options side-by-side. Once stakeholders are aligned, simply apply the winning scenario to update your plan of record and execute the best path forward with certainty.
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Scenario Planning is available on Enterprise plans only. Enhanced features, including planning with placeholders, role and discipline insights, are available with the Resource Management add-on.
Use Scenario Planning when something changes or is about to change and you need to understand the impact before committing.
For example:
- A project gets added or prioritized - how do you find the resources to make it work?
- A resource gets reassigned to another project — what happens to your timeline?
- Leadership asks you to accelerate delivery—can you realistically do so, and what are the trade-offs?
- You're heading into quarterly planning and want to pressure-test your commitments before locking them in.
Who is Scenario Planning for?
Scenario Planning is built for the people closest to delivery:
- Project managers who need to manage at-risk delivery when resources, timelines, or priorities shift.
- Resource managers who need to balance workloads, prevent overallocation, and respond to headcount changes.
- Team leads and department heads who need to protect their teams, manage expectations, and make data-backed asks to leadership.
Access Scenario Plans
To access your scenario plans, you can:
Via Browse
Select Browse in the left navigation bar, and select Scenario Plans.
Via the workspace panel
Open the workspace where your projects live, select its name, and open the workspace panel on the left.
How Scenario Planning works
To create a scenario plan, you must be an Admin on the workspace where you want to create the plan, as well as all project sheets you want to include in the plan.
Prerequisites
- Scenario Planning works with existing project sheets. You can't create a project from scratch inside Scenario Planning, as your sheets must already exist and be properly configured before you create a plan.
Required columns: Start Date, End Date, and Assigned To.
Your Assigned To column can be single or multi-contact. For best results, use the same contact column type across all projects in a plan.
Optional columns: Duration, Predecessor, Allocation, Phase
Your project sheets must also have Workload Tracking enabled. If it isn't already configured, the setup flow walks you through enabling it when you create your scenario plan.
Scenario Planning follows a three-step workflow: Build your scenarios, compare them, and apply the one that works best.
Build your scenario
Create a scenario plan from your existing project sheets. You can include up to 5 project sheets in a single plan and create up to 3 scenarios within it. After creating it, you can also modify your plan to add or remove projects.
Once your scenario plan is set up, make changes directly in the timeline to shift task dates, reassign resources, add or remove tasks, and adjust allocations. Your changes appear in real time on both the timeline and capacity views, and nothing touches your live plans until you choose to apply.
Learn more about how to create a scenario.
Compare scenarios
Use the comparison view to evaluate your scenarios against your current plan. Key metrics include completed date variance, tasks at risk, as well as resource overallocation and underallocation. You can filter by time frame and drill down into each metric to see which projects, tasks, and resources are affected.
If you have the Resource Management add-on, you can also view role and discipline allocation data.
Learn more about how to compare scenarios.
Apply a scenario
You need Admin permissions on both the scenario plan and all destination sheets to apply a scenario.
When you've identified the best path forward, apply that scenario to push your changes back to your live project sheets. You'll see an impact summary showing exactly what will change before you confirm, and the system automatically creates a backup of your plan of record.
Once you apply a scenario, the entire scenario plan becomes read-only. You can't make further edits to any scenario in the plan. To continue planning, create a new scenario plan.
Learn more about how to apply a scenario.
What Scenario Planning is not
Scenario Planning is designed for delivery and analyzes how changes to tasks, timelines, and resources impact active projects.
It doesn’t support:
- Budget or financial modeling
- Cross-portfolio planning or program-level tradeoffs
- Organization-level resource capacity planning
- Strategic roadmapping or project prioritization
Limitations
Keep the following limitations in mind when working with Scenario Planning:
- A scenario plan can contain up to 3 scenarios.
- You can include up to 5 project sheets in a single scenario plan.
- Scenario plans don't automatically sync when source project sheets are updated. Use the refresh option to pull in the latest baseline.
- Once you apply a scenario, the entire scenario plan becomes read-only. Create a new plan to continue planning.