A plan defines the hierarchy of work activities that must be completed for a project or program. It identifies the steps that must be completed and defines the order in which the steps must be started. The structure provides a means of breaking down complex projects or programs into manageable components. In very large projects or programs, one individual might define a top-level structure and then several individuals might supply the detailed breakdown for the top-level summary activities.

The Plan page displays information about the activities, summary activities, milestones, and subprojects associated with the current project or program. If you are a project or program manager, you can create, edit, delete, move, and duplicate plan objects from this page. Anyone can subscribe to plan objects, but only plan object owners can edit the plan objects for which they are responsible.

The data defined in the different plan objects is used to calculate the overall status of a project or program. Almost all calculations are pessimistic. For example, if all of the objects in a plan have a status of "green" except one which has a status of "red," then the overall plan status is set to "red."

Depending on the project or program settings, plan information can be automatically calculated. If at any time, a user overrides a system calculation with a manually entered specification, that information is displayed on a gray background. For example, if a project or program manager manually changes the duration of an activity, that duration, when seen on information pages, is displayed on a gray background to indicate that the system calculation has been overridden.

You can also view a timeline of the plan on this page. For more information, see About Timeline.