Rocketlane’s Task Effort Planning feature gives project managers control over how work is distributed among team members for each task.
Effort Customization Options
When planning effort at the task level, you can define the total effort in hours and choose how it's distributed among assignees:
Equal Split: Total effort is automatically divided equally among all task assignees.
Custom Split: You can manually allocate effort to each assignee based on their expected workload or capacity.
This allows teams to reflect the real distribution of responsibility per task, whether roles are shared evenly or require a heavier lift from some team members.
Dynamic Effort Adjustments
Effort planning is flexible and responds dynamically to changes in the task:
If total effort changes:
With equal split, all assignees’ hours update automatically to maintain equal shares.
With a custom split, each person’s effort scales proportionally, maintaining the previously defined ratios.
This ensures that updates to overall effort don’t disrupt planned workloads unless you choose to override them.
Managing Assignees
Effort planning accommodates real-world shifts in team composition:
Adding a new assignee: They are added with zero hours by default, so you can manually define their effort without affecting existing allocations.
Removing an assignee: Their share of hours is redistributed proportionally among the remaining team members, keeping the total task effort unchanged.
Placeholder Support
If you've added placeholders instead of actual team members during planning:
Once resolved (i.e., replaced with a real user), the effort allocated to the placeholder carries over, preserving the original role-based distribution, to ensure continuity in planning without the need to manually re-assign effort after resolving placeholders.
Auto-Allocation Integration
When auto-allocation is enabled in your project settings:
Task-level efforts defined here automatically translate into resource allocations on the project plan. This keeps your effort planning and resource allocation in sync, helping teams ensure that actual capacity planning aligns with task responsibilities.