Planner & region evolution

The master schedule lives in P6, and it stays there. What a planner lacks is not another place to draw bars — it is a legible picture of what is actually happening on the ground to hold the schedule against. That is what the Planner surface is: a read-only view of reality, organised the way a lookahead is organised — contractor × place × day — so the two can be read side by side. SimOps never asserts that anything is late. It supplies the numbers; the judgement stays with the person who owns the plan.

What it does for you

• A lookahead shaped like your lookahead. The spine is a day-column matrix, grouped contractor-first and pivotable to place-first, so it reads against a P6 Gantt without translation. The horizon is 2, 4 or 6 weeks forward with a fixed five-day backward tail — the tail is what makes overstay visible ("still in the Turbine Hall three days after they should have moved").
• The atom is an issued permit. An activity is an issued Permit read as a unit of scheduled work: it is the one object that carries a structured who (Contractor), what (permit categories), when (Permit window) and where. The placed workers, plant and areas linked to it are its manifestation — they supply the hard location and the human labels the permit's own free-text location lacks.
• Place, not just polygon. The location axis is the Named place — a building or a zone, treated as one axis because a planner reasons about both as named locations. Floor is a first-class drill-down, so "in the Electrical Building" and "on Level 2" are both askable.
• Spatial contention, which P6 cannot see. A schedule encodes activity logic; it does not know that four trades are booked into the same room on Thursday. Congestion — distinct contractors per place per day — tints the place choropleth on the map, so over-subscribed ground reads at a glance.
• Nothing hides. Work with no permit behind it is not silently dropped: unpermitted tokens surface in their own bucket, and permits whose location could not be matched to a place surface in the spine as unresolved rather than vanishing.

What it deliberately does not do

The Planner does not plan. It has no create, no edit and no save; there is nothing on it to submit. The in-app planning cycle — draft cycles, contractor submissions, the baseline/planned/actual fork and the planned-versus-actual compare — was removed in full (see planning-removal), and this surface is what remained standing: a live read, not a fork of the data. Nor does it compute variance against your programme. SimOps is the reality-record; the gap between that record and the plan is the planner's to read, deliberately (see planner-analysis-reality-not-plan).

Two honest limits worth knowing before you cite a number. The view reads live, mutable rows — it is a proxy for reality, only as current as the site team keeps it, never verified actuals. And the counts are markers, not people: a worker count is "worker pins placed here", which is not the same thing as a headcount.

Region evolution — one piece of ground, forward through time

The spine reads the whole site by contractor and place. Its companion reads the opposite way: pick a piece of ground — right-click a building, a zone or a placed entity on the map and choose Scheduled changes here, or click a place label inside Reality — and ask what is scheduled to change there. The answer is a stream of changepoints: the moments the population of that ground actually changes, each naming what entered, what exited, and how much is in scope afterwards.

The Stepper walks them one at a time, and it moves the site clock as it goes — there is one cursor, not two, so stepping scrubs the map and scrubbing the map re-highlights the row. The map door lands it as a transient, tab-less Changes here view of the Work rail; ✕ or Escape puts you back exactly where you were. (The stepper's old Work-home tab and its constructor grid retired in the fold — every door pre-anchors its region, so there is nothing left to construct by hand.)

Where to find it

Both live in the Work home (W), the domain home for scheduled work in place and time — its tabs are Plan · Reality:

• Reality — the Planner spine, the place drill (the changepoint stepper over one place) and the map choropleth. Q opens the Work home straight onto it.
• Changes here — the same stepper, landed by the map's right-click Scheduled changes here door, tab-less and transient.

Reality answers to planner_view (coordinator, admin, and the site-manager deputy), so the Q chord stays inert for a membership that can see the Work button but not the tab. The map door sits on the wider entity_view band — it is a new lens on scheduled work the membership can already see, not new data.

See it / try it