When you’re managing complex projects in regulated industries, the gap between “nice to have” and “actually helps me do my job” is substantial. This month’s updates across GANTT, PLANNINGBOARD, RISKSHEET, POWERSHEET, and CHECKLIST focus squarely on the latter.
Finding the Signal in the Noise
Teams working with large datasets know the frustration: you need to update terminology across dozens of risk descriptions, but doing it manually means hours of work and inevitable inconsistencies.
RISKSHEET’s new Find & Replace addresses exactly this. It’s not just search—it supports regex patterns, whole-word matching, and flexible scope control. Whether you’re standardizing terminology for an audit or updating references after a system redesign, you can now do it systematically across your entire risk register. Replace all at once, or step through changes when precision matters more than speed.
This is the kind of feature that saves hours in the moment and prevents errors that cost days to fix later.
Making the Invisible Visible
Project plans fail quietly. A task gets assigned to someone who’s on vacation. An iteration extends past a regulatory deadline. By the time these issues surface in meetings, recovery options have narrowed.
Two updates this month make scheduling problems visible before they become crises:
GANTT now highlights tasks assigned to unavailable resources. If you schedule work during a period when the assigned user has no working days, those tasks appear in red. It’s a simple visual flag, but it prevents the common scenario where theoretical plans collide with actual availability.
PLANNINGBOARD flags items planned beyond their due date. When an iteration’s end date extends past a milestone deadline, you see it immediately. No more discovering schedule conflicts during sprint reviews—you catch them during planning.
Both features share the same philosophy: don’t wait for someone to ask the right question. Show the problem when it matters.
Licensing and Administration Updates
Less visible but equally important: Gantt, Planningboard, and Risksheet all now use our unified licensing and admin framework. This means consistent license management across your Nextedy toolset, upload of license file via the administration, concurrent license support, and better visibility into versions and changelogs directly in the admin interface.
When licensing isn’t active, apps operate in read-only mode—protecting your data while signaling clearly that action is needed.
The Team Planning Challenge
Here’s a scenario we’re exploring with several customers: you’re planning work six to twelve months out, but you don’t yet know which specific individuals will be available. You know your team capacity—perhaps 5 FTE, representing 40 hours per day—but not the names.
GANTT’s prototype team assignment feature lets you plan against capacity placeholders rather than individual assignees. This is explicitly marked as proof-of-concept work, built for specific customer needs. If long-term capacity planning is something your organization struggles with, let’s talk about whether this approach fits your workflow.
We ship prototypes like this when we see a pattern worth exploring, not because the feature is finished. That’s the honest way to innovate with customers.
Small Fixes That Matter
This month’s updates include a series of targeted fixes inspired directly by customer feedback and real-world usage. When something disrupts your workflow, we treat it as top priority — because your productivity and confidence in our tools matter most.
- Work item type picker availability in RISKSHEET when project properties aren’t configured
- Focus behavior in RISKSHEET after item selection
- Root items not nested correctly under related items in GANTT
- Resource bubble interactions in GANTT when rows are collapsed
- Enum-user field display issues in GANTT
- POWERSHEET initialization issue on HTTP-only connections resolved
We know that even small issues can slow teams down. That’s why we listen closely, respond fast, and deliver fixes that keep your daily work smooth and efficient.
Configuration Flexibility
PLANNINGBOARD now supports configurable team enum keys, recognizing custom team identifiers when calculating capacity and assignments. If your organization uses a custom field structure for team definitions, capacity planning now works correctly on the Iterations Board.
CHECKLIST introduces selective workflow bypass, allowing administrators to define users for whom automated checklist resets don’t apply. This is specifically designed for scenarios like bulk imports or data migrations, where triggering checklist workflows thousands of times creates unnecessary overhead.
Both updates reflect the same principle: enterprise tools should adapt to your process, not force you to adapt to the tool.
Focus Preservation
When you collapse swimlanes in PLANNINGBOARD to manage screen real estate, then make edits and save, the app now returns focus to where you were working and remembers your collapse state. This sounds minor until you’ve lost your place repeatedly during intensive planning sessions.
Maintaining context across saves reduces cognitive load. That matters more than most people realize.
A Note on AI
We’ve been asked why we haven’t rushed AI features into our products.
Because we wanted to make sure they deliver value, not just demonstrate capability.
RISKSHEET Copilot is now working with key accounts in validation. It suggests harms in the context of user needs, identifies hazards for functions and components, and proposes causes for failure modes based on system elements. This isn’t a chatbot—it’s contextual assistance for structured safety analysis.
We’re validating with customers before general release because in regulated industries, “interesting” isn’t good enough. Tools need to be reliable, auditable, and genuinely helpful.
If you want to see what context-aware AI assistance looks like in functional safety workflows, reach out. We’re working with a limited group of organizations to refine the approach.
Ready to see these updates in action? These features are available now across GANTT, PLANNINGBOARD, RISKSHEET, and CHECKLIST.
Interested in RISKSHEET Copilot? Contact us to discuss validation participation and scheduling a demonstration.
What’s Next
Since its September launch, POWERSHEET has received strong feedback from early evaluators and enterprise teams now working on adoption. We’re refining it continuously based on their input — from template usability to performance and configuration flexibility.
If your team still manages traceability or risk relationships in spreadsheets, now’s the time to see how POWERSHEET can change that.
👉 Move your Excel traceability into Polarion
Until next month — stay efficient, connected, and let’s keep pushing Polarion forward together. 🚀