The Planning page enables you to establish resource and role demand on a proposed project without the need to perform time-consuming resource and role loading on a detailed project plan. You can maintain the high-level allocation data throughout the life of the project and reference these high level plans when you assign resources and roles at a more detailed level. Although resources and roles might not be assigned to specific activities early in the project lifecycle, the Planning page enables you to plan time commitments against a project. Assigning resources and roles to projects in the early stages of project development can help to prevent overallocation.
You can use the spreadsheet on the Planning page to specify, view, or modify project-level and WBS-level allocation data for individual resources and roles across a project life cycle. For each resource or role assignment, you can record total allocated units, that P6 distributes across the project timescale. You can also record individual timescale allocated values, that P6 sums to provide total allocation units. For resource assignments, you can base your allocation decisions on the resource's current availability, that P6 recalculates live as you edit allocated values.
You can filter the Planning page to view the assignments for a single project, a group of projects assigned to a portfolio or project code, a single resource or role, a group of resources assigned to a code or team, or a group of roles assigned to a code or team.You can view resource planning data for any project you have access to, but you can only add, modify, and delete resource or role assignments if you have the required project-level security privileges. Because the security privileges can be applied down to the WBS level, you can choose to assign resources and roles to some, but not all, WBS elements within a project.
The spreadsheet uses published and summary data to calculate availability, so it reflects values as of the last date that the project was published and summarized. Assignment changes within a project after that date will not be reflected until the project is next published and summarized.
A project setting on the Analytics & Services tab of the Project Preferences dialog box enables you to specify whether allocation assigned on the Plan Resources spreadsheet is included in other allocation-related pages, such as Resource Usage, after you summarize and publish the project.
Note: When you open the Planning page, it is automatically filtered to the last saved data you were using. To see other data, change the filter applied to the page.