Schedule Projection & Compression

Enterprise

Schedule projection turns a scope plus your team's capacity into a forecast — when the work lands under your own estimates, and which deliverables would have to give to hit a target date. It forecasts; it does not plan.

Availability

The compression meter and the Gantt view are Enterprise entitlements and are additionally behind rollout flags — they may not be visible in your workspace yet even on an Enterprise plan. See the feature matrix.

The projection engine

Given a scope version, your team capacity (FTE, workweek, holidays), a calendar, and an anchor date, the engine produces:

• Per-item start and finish dates for each deliverable
• Total effort in person-days
• An implied end date
• A p80 end — a risk-inflated finish that accounts for estimate uncertainty
• The critical path

It is priority-ordered greedy scheduling, parallelized across your FTE count, dependency-aware (you can supply an optional dependency graph), and calendar-aware (it respects your workweek and holidays). It computes a calibrated p50 finish and an inflated-effort p80 tail.

It forecasts, it does not plan

The engine has no assignees, no percent-complete, and no baselines, and it is not a resource-leveller. It answers "given this scope and this team, when does it realistically finish?" — it does not assign people to tasks or optimize a plan. Because scope effort is document-level, the total is split evenly across deliverables that don't carry their own effort.

The compression meter

The compression meter takes a projection plus a target date and tells you whether the date fits, through two lenses:

• Capacity lens — required person-days versus the person-days actually available before the target (FTE × working days). The gap is how much you're over or under.
• Schedule lens — what gives: the specific deliverables whose projected finish lands past the target once dependencies and limited parallelism are accounted for.

From these it derives a status and a plain-language sentence:

Status	Meaning
on_track	The target date fits under current capacity.
compressed	The work fits in calendar time but demands more than the available capacity.
schedule_bound	Dependencies or sequencing push work past the target regardless of capacity.

The meter surfaces on the scope editor, so you can see the effect of a date before committing to it.

Capacity profiles and scenarios

• Capacity profiles are reusable and org-scoped — define your team's FTE, workweek, and holidays once and reuse them across documents.
• Each document has one target-date scenario — the date you're testing the scope against.

Deleting a profile is safe

A scenario keeps its committed target date even if the capacity profile it referenced is deleted — deleting a profile doesn't silently drop a PM's target.

The Gantt view

A separate, read-only Gantt view visualizes the projection — per-item bars, the critical path, and the implied timeline. Like the meter, it is an Enterprise entitlement behind a rollout flag. It's a view of the forecast, not an editable plan.

How it fits together

1. Generate and approve a scope.
2. Set a capacity profile and a target date.
3. Read the compression meter: does the date fit, and if not, what gives?
4. Adjust scope or date, and re-check.

As real effort lands, calibration sharpens the estimates the projection is built on.