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PM onboarding bundle

All plans Portfolio Manager

A reading guide for new project managers in Onplana. Eight articles in the order that takes you from “first sign-in” to “running a real project, on a real budget, with a working team” inside a week. Each article is short on its own; sequence is what makes the set productive.

Estimated reading + setup time: 90 minutes.

Day 1: orient yourself

Section titled “Day 1: orient yourself”

  1. Take the product tour — five minutes inside the in-app guided tour. Click through it first so the rest of these guides reference views you have already seen.

  2. Create your first project — the fastest path to a populated project. Either drop in a template (PMI-style waterfall, agile sprint, OKR rollout), let the AI assistant scaffold from a one-line goal, or start from a blank board. Pick a real project, not a sandbox — the docs feel different when you use them on actual work.

Day 2: bring the team in

Section titled “Day 2: bring the team in”
  1. Invite your team — add the people doing the work. Decide on org roles (Owner, Admin, Portfolio Manager, Member, Guest) before sending invites; demoting later is awkward. Members can create their own projects and join yours; Guests are project-only for external collaborators.

Day 3: lay out the schedule

Section titled “Day 3: lay out the schedule”

  1. Plan on the Gantt chart — the timeline view where you actually plan. Drag bars to reschedule, draw dependency arrows for finish-to-start (and the three other types) relationships, filter by assignee, and snap milestones to the right dates.

  2. Set up recurring tasks — the standing items that should not clutter the planning pass: weekly status writeups, monthly steering committees, quarterly reviews. Anything that repeats on a calendar belongs here so it doesn’t eat planning bandwidth.

Day 4: build the operating rhythm

Section titled “Day 4: build the operating rhythm”
  1. Manage project status and progress — the five project statuses and how progress is auto-calculated. Get into the habit of moving projects between Planning → Active → On Hold / Completed as soon as the reality on the ground changes; stakeholders read those statuses literally.

Day 5: get the money right

Section titled “Day 5: get the money right”

  1. Configure rate cards — the cost and (optionally) billable rates that drive earned-value math and billable utilization. Three scopes: org default, role rate, per-user rate. Worth getting before the first timesheet week so historical data is priced correctly.

  2. Read the EVM dashboard — the Finance tab on every project. Earned Value, Schedule Performance Index, Cost Performance Index, and forecast. Once rate cards are in place this page tells you whether the project is on track, ahead, or sliding, in 30 seconds.

What’s next

Section titled “What’s next”

After this bundle you have a project that runs end-to-end. The natural follow-ons:

  • Track strategic alignment with Goals and OKRs if your organization manages outcomes at the company level.
  • Save a cross-project Report for the metrics you want to monitor across every project you own.
  • Build a Custom Dashboard to combine widgets from across the product into one daily-driver view.

FAQs

Section titled “FAQs”

Should I do this in order or pick the articles I need? Order matters most for days 1-3. Once you have a project with the team in it, days 4-5 are reorderable.

Can I run this bundle with multiple projects? Yes, and you should — the rate cards, dashboards, and reports start paying off once 2-3 projects share the same setup. Add projects as you go; the org-level configuration (roles, rate cards, calendars) applies to all of them.

Is this enough for a project manager to run a complex program? For a single workstream, yes. For a multi-project program with formal governance, add Portfolios (Business+) and Governance (Enterprise) after this bundle.