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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2025-09-19
Setup Considerations: Project Plans

Setup Considerations: Project Plans

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of project plans. It explains:
  • Why to set them up.
  • How they fit into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What They Are

In Workday, you can use project plans to organize these aspects of a project:
  • Project phases
  • Project tasks
  • Worker assignments
  • Timelines
  • Risks

Business Benefits

  • Streamline the creation and management of your project plans.
  • Reduce data entry for commonly used information.
  • Increase efficiency by defining project timelines and setting milestones for billing and tracking.
  • Reduce effort, maintain consistency, and avoid errors by controlling the content of project plans.

Use Cases

  • Specify the window of time that workers can record their hours on a project.
  • Assign workers to specific project tasks so they can log time against their task assignments.
  • Add risks that might affect your project plan, such as extreme weather conditions or personnel turnover.
  • Update all dates on your project tasks, task resources, or task-level resource forecasts at once.
  • Export project information, such as project plan phases and scheduling information, to an XML file that can be imported into Microsoft® Project.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
Do your project plans contain common information?
You can use templates to streamline data entry and reduce user errors.
When you create templates for project plans and task resources, Workday prefills the common information that most users need to enter.
How do you want to organize the work for your project plans?
Workday organizes your project work into:
  • Phases that sequence the work for the project. Project phases are a required component of project plans.
  • Tasks that define the work details of the project phases. Project tasks are an optional component of project plans. When you configure project tasks, you can also create detailed resource forecasts and detailed project budgets.
You can create project plans that have:
  • A flat structure with project plan phases all at the same level. These standard project plans enable you to use templates to prefill common information.
  • A tree structure with up to 9 child phases under each top-level project plan phase. These multilevel project plans enable you to create detailed Advanced reports.
How do you want to make project tasks available for project plans?
You can restrict project tasks to specific project hierarchies, ensuring that the tasks are only available to the project plans for the projects on:
  • The restricted project hierarchy.
  • A parent project hierarchy.
By restricting the project tasks, you ensure that project managers only see the tasks that are relevant to their project.
When you don't restrict a project task to a hierarchy, it's available for use on all projects on all hierarchies.
Do you need custom names for your project plan tasks?
You can create custom names for your project plan tasks to ensure that the names are relevant to your projects.
To create custom task names, you must first enable the security policy for the
Manage: Project Custom Task Name
 domain.
What date range do you want to set for workers logging their time on a project?
By default, Workday sets the date range for time entry to the start and end dates of the project.
You can configure a narrower date range for workers to log their time when you set up the tenant by using the dates specified in:
  • Resource plans.
  • Project plan tasks.
  • Task resources.
You can use multiple sources to narrow the date range. Workers can only log time where the selected date ranges overlap.
Do you want to define the severity levels for your project risks?
You can define the severity levels of your project risks, to ensure data consistency.
Determine the security levels for your project risks before you set up your project plans.

Recommendations

  • Create templates for your standard project plans and your task resources to reduce the time users spend on data entry. Workday populates the fields on the project plan with information from its associated template.
  • Restrict project plan tasks to the relevant project hierarchies for simplified task selection.

Requirements

Create a project. You can only create a project plan for an existing project.

Limitations

  • Workday didn't design project plans for use with Agile methodologies.
  • Project plan tasks don't have dependencies. You can't initiate a cascading update of the dates on project plan tasks.
  • If a project plan has more than 500 rows of phases and tasks in the
    Project Plan
     grid, Workday has reduced performance.
  • Multilevel project plans don't allow you to:
    • Copy them when you create a new project by copying an existing project.
    • Create project plan templates.
    • Export multilevel project plans to Microsoft Project.
  • The
    Project Planner
     report doesn't:
    • Support data sorting.
    • Copy from the previous row.
    • Have related actions directly from the project plan phases, tasks, or resources. To access related actions, click the hyperlink for the project plan phase or project plan task and select the menu in the preview window.

Tenant Setup

Access the
Projects
 section on the
Edit Tenant Setup - Financials
 task to set the date range within which workers can record their hours on a project.

Security

Domains
Considerations
Manage: Project Integration
 in the Projects functional area
Enables users to export project information for use with Microsoft Project.
Manage: Project Plan
 in the Project Tracking functional area
Enables users to manage and view information for both standard and multilevel project plans.
Manage: Project Task Resources
 in the Projects functional area
Enables users to manage project plan tasks.
Set Up: Project Details
 in the Project Tracking functional area
Enables users to manage the configuration for project details, including phases and tasks.
Manage: Project Details
 in the Project Tracking functional area
Enables users to manage and view existing projects.
Manage: Project Custom Task Name
 in the Project Tracking functional area
Enables users to create and edit custom task names.
To ensure proper access, review these team member roles and activities:
Domain Security Roles
Responsibilities
Project Administrator
  • Configures tenant setup information.
  • Configures the
    Project Plan
     and
    Project Planner
     reports.
  • Creates projects.
Project Manager
  • Creates projects with project plans.
  • Manages the project plan, project phases, and project tasks.
  • Assigns task resources.
Project Workers
Log time on their assigned project plan tasks using Time Tracking.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

Report
Description
Project Planner
Create, edit, and view a project plan on 1 page.
View Project Plan
Displays the project plan.
View Project Plan Timeline
Displays the schedule for project phases and tasks.
You can use these report data sources to create custom reports:
  • Project Time Blocks Approved Between a Date Range
  • Project Plan Phases
  • Project Plan Tasks
  • Project Task Resources

Integrations

Web Services
Considerations
Get Project Plans
Put Project Plan
Enables you to manage project plans.
Get Project Plan without Dependencies
Enables you to retrieve multilevel project plans without retaining the parent and child relationships between the phase levels.
Get Project Phases
Put Project Phase
Enables you to manage project phases.
Get Project Tasks
Put Project Task
Enables you to manage project tasks.
For
Put
, all task names must be unique, not just the task IDs.
Get Project Task Resources
Put Project Task Resources
Enables you to manage project task resources.

Connections and Touchpoints

Features
Considerations
Time Tracking
You can restrict workers to log only their time during the dates on their project plan tasks, task resource assignments, or both. Workers can only log time where the selected date ranges overlap.
Project hierarchies
You can restrict project plan tasks to specific project hierarchies. This restriction ensures that project managers only see the tasks that are relevant to their business unit, not all of the tasks in the tenant.
Resource plans
You need to first create a resource plan for your project and assign workers to it. Then you can assign workers to the project tasks in your project plan.
Resource forecasts
You can create resource forecasts based on your task resource assignments.
Services CPQ
You can configure the
Quote Event
 or
Convert Opportunity Project to Project
 business processes to automatically create or update a project plan for quote phases and tasks after Workday creates a project from an approved and primary quote.
Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.