Baselines, Dependencies & Capacity
Commit a programme with a baseline, link the work with dependencies, and read allocated effort against each person's working day.
Dates on their own are a wish list. Three things turn a breakdown into a programme you can hold people to: a baseline that records what was agreed, dependencies that say what has to happen before what, and capacity that says whether the people you have can actually absorb it.
Baselines
A baseline is a snapshot of the dates as they stood when the programme was signed off. Once it exists, the Timeline draws it under the live bar, so slippage shows up on the same row rather than in somebody's second copy of the plan.
To take one, open an item's actions menu and choose Set baseline. On anything with children the option reads Set baseline (with sub-items) and takes the whole subtree, because a planner commits a phase, not a row. To baseline several unrelated items at once, select their rows on the Outline, Table or Board and use the bulk Set baseline action.
| Behaviour | What happens |
|---|---|
| What gets recorded | The item's stored start and due dates — not whatever a stale tab happens to be showing |
| Items with no dates | Their baseline is cleared, not invented. The confirmation tells you how many were cleared |
| Taking a second baseline | Replaces the first. There is one committed plan, not a stack of them |
| Duplicating an item | The copy carries no baseline. A copy is new work and has not been committed to anything |
Turn the baseline bar off and on with Display → Baseline in the toolbar.
Dependencies
A dependency links two items and says how they relate. Open an item's page and go to the Dependencies tab, then Add Dependency.
| Relation | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Blocks | This item has to finish before the other can proceed |
| Blocked by | The other item has to finish before this one can |
| Precedes | This item comes before the other in sequence |
| Follows | This item comes after the other |
| Relates to | The two are connected, with no ordering implied |
Add a lag in days if there is a wait between them — a curing period, a delivery lead time, an inspection window. The item picker searches by title or WBS code, and leaves out the item itself and anything already linked, so you cannot create a duplicate by accident.
The list flips perspective for you. Link A blocks B, and B's own tab reads Blocked by A — you record the relationship once and read it correctly from either end.
Circular chains are refused
PleoStack will not let a blocks or precedes chain loop back on itself: "This dependency would create a circular dependency chain." If a link is refused, follow the chain the other way — something further along is already pointing back here.
Where dependencies show up
- Timeline — drawn as lines between bars. Toggle with Display → Dependencies
- Lookahead — each row lists its Blocked by, Blocks and Related items, and marks anything On critical path
- Peek panel — the relation and the other item's title, on any view where peek is available
Float and the critical path
With dependencies and dates in place, the Timeline works out which chain of work drives the finish date — the critical path — and how much float the rest of the work has. Both are on by default and can be toggled under Display.
A five-day week is assumed
Float and the critical path are calculated on a Monday-to-Friday working week. Site holidays, shutdowns and a six-day week are not taken into account, so treat float as the optimistic figure if your site does not run Monday to Friday.
Capacity and Workload
The Workload view answers a different question from the Timeline: not when is this happening, but can the people we have absorb it.
| Column | Shows |
|---|---|
| Assignee | The project member |
| Allocated | Effort from the items assigned to them in the period on screen |
| Capacity | Their working day across that period |
| Utilisation | Allocated against capacity — Over capacity, At capacity or Under capacity |
For a row to mean anything, the work under it needs estimated hours and an assignee. Add hours in Planning & Effort on the item's page, or in the Table view's Est. hrs column.
Only the bottom of the tree is counted. A parent's effort is its children's effort, so counting both would charge the same hours to the same person twice.
A person's working day is set on the project's member list, under Admin → Members & Roles, in the Working day column. Where nobody has set one, the view works on an 8-hour day.
Use Display → Timeline scale to change the period the numbers are read over — Day, Week, Month, Quarter or Year.