The current release of 2-plan Desktop supports 3 types of project plans – Manual, Effort-Driven and Fixed Duration projects. However, we will introduce other project plan types in the subsequent releases of 2-plan Desktop. Let’s take a quick look at these 3 project plan types.

Manual

Manual projects are for persons who quickly need a Gantt chart or a nice visual representation of schedules and other project components for use in a presentation (as required by almost 50% of users of PM tools). In this case, there are no values for efforts and there are no durations for work packages.

Hence, there is no "scheduler" of the dates to calculate the start-end relationship. The user specifies the start and finish dates, for example, by simply dragging and moving down the work packages in the Gantt chart. Efforts, durations, and resource allocations are neither regarded nor shown. This is one option for all beginners with a simplified UI.

Effort-Driven

The Effort-driven project plan calculates the duration based on the assigned staff. There is no fixed duration. The user enters a cost and indirectly determines the duration through the resource allocation (usually, the planning of IT projects follows this). An effort-driven project plan could be team-enabled or role-enabled or both team-enabled and role-enabled.

Fixed Duration

Fixed duration project plans are those for which the duration of the project is of prime importance; the duration of the project is known and not the effort/cost. Moreover, since the duration has to be kept fixed, the resource loading will have to be done in a way that the tasks are completed in the given time. So, for a fixed duration project when you schedule work packages (fixed duration type), the resource loading needs to be changed in order to complete the work packages in a given duration.