Plan projects – even when you don’t have the exact details – using placeholders. Discover how to use placeholders to plan demand, manage capacity, request resources, and more.
Placeholders are tentative resource requirements, a tool to indicate demand on future projects. They let project-based businesses plan, budget, and schedule projects even when the exact details are still TBC.
They’re a flag in the ground that says ‘We’re going to need another developer’ or ‘We’ll need 100 engineer hours to get this project done’.
Here’s what you need to know about what placeholders are, why they’re so advantageous to project-based businesses, and how to use them in your project plans.
Placeholders are used when you have a project to plan out but don't yet know who to assign to it.
In other words, placeholders are a way to provisionally plan a project even when you don’t have all of the information you need. Once the information becomes available, you can replace the placeholder with the exact details the plan requires.
By using placeholders, project managers can:
In this article, we focus on placeholders in terms of human resources – the people you’ll need to deliver your project. They’re a key element in strategic capacity planning – providing visibility into resource supply and demand.
For example, when you know you’ll need a certain type of resource but not the exact people you want to allocate, you can add placeholder resources - Developer, Graphic Designer, Project Manager, or other. This lets you plan the project and estimate resource requirements and costs, even if you don’t have specific people in mind yet. It also helps flag resource constraints and recruitment needs in advance.
Let’s imagine you manage projects for a software agency, and you have a new project coming in. You can start planning the project including the skills you need without necessarily knowing who to assign the project to. This way, you'll be able to uncover the demand for specific skills or roles and calculate the project cost.
Placeholders will help you begin to plan the project, budget, and timeframe – and request resources – even without the exact details available.
There’s a saying that "Perfection is the enemy of done". If you wait to plan your project until you have all the details pinned down, you’ll never write it.
Project-based businesses need a way to plan and schedule their projects even when they’re at an embryonic stage. Otherwise, they’ll be completely in the dark with their capacity planning and resource demand.
Placeholders help project managers and organizations to:
In a dynamic business environment – with so many projects and moving parts – placeholders allow for planning to progress and decisions to be made.
➡️ Related: How to Do a Resource Gap Analysis in 5 Steps
If you use resource management software – or capacity planning software – you’ll almost certainly have the ability to add placeholders to your project plans.
Here are some examples of how you can use placeholders in Runn. But the principles should be equally applicable to other tools.
You need to build your project plan but you aren’t sure exactly which named resources you want to assign.
Simply open the project in your Project Planner and click on ‘Add person or placeholder’.
Click on ‘placeholder’ and select the correct roles from the drop-down - Business Analyst or Data Engineer. Click ‘Add selected’. Repeat this for all team members. Create assignments as normal.
Voila! Your plan now includes placeholders. And because placeholder rate and costs will come from their role, you will have an accurate estimate for labor costs calculated.
You can come back to the project and fill in exact team details when you’re ready to.
Note: Placeholders take their charge-out rate from the role charge-out rate you have set-up for your project. You can set custom hourly costs for each placeholder or use the default internal role cost you set up when you create a new role in Runn. Nifty, eh?
You’ve used placeholders to plan your project but now you’re ready to allocate some specific people. Click on your placeholder, then ‘Edit details’, then ‘Find person’.
You’ll be shown a split screen that shows people that match your parameters – alongside their availability. When you find a good fit resource, click on the ‘Transfer’ button to allocate the work to them.
If resources are allocated by a central team, you can use placeholders as a way to request them. Add a placeholder and then click ‘Edit details’ to fill in the details of exactly what you need.
Then click ‘Request’ and you’ll see two options.
A small yellow flag icon will appear. If the request is filled, the correct person will be added to your project. If a hiring process begins, you will see an icon to say recruitment is in progress.
As you’ve seen, Runn users can use placeholders to request resources. If you’re the Resource Manager – or other member of a Resource Management Office – it’s easy to see resource requests. Take a look at this Resourcing Requests help page for more information on what you can see.
You might worry that placeholders will mess up your reporting. Not the case. Any future placeholder hours you have scheduled will be included to calculate your project metrics. That means you can calculate project costs and potential profit without needing to know the exact staffing yet.
Why only future placeholders? We’re glad you asked. Any placeholder hours you have scheduled in the past will not be used to calculate your project metrics. This is because placeholders are a tool to indicate future demand for a role. We assume that – for past placeholders – you'll have either replaced that placeholder with a real person on your team, or you no longer have that resource requirement.
Curious about placeholders and how they work? The best way to learn is to do. So feel free to play around with placeholders in Runn.
Simply sign up for your free 14-day Runn trial and have at it.
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Just sign up with your email and use Runn as your sandbox for two whole weeks.
