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Almost everything Scheduler tells you at a glance, it tells you with colour: whether a task is finished, whether it is late, and whether the person it sits on can actually absorb it. This page is the key to those colours, and to the card that carries them.

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Anatomy of a task card

A card on the timeline packs a work item into the width of its schedule. Reading it from left to right: The card’s height is set by the Card Height parameter, 50 pixels by default. Raise it when your titles or effort figures need more room — see Widget Parameters.
With Plans Type set to Remaining Estimate + Time Spent, the fields line shows the remaining estimate followed by the combined figure in parentheses. If neither a remaining estimate nor time spent is recorded, it falls back to the initial estimate.

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The hover handles

Hovering a card on the timeline reveals two handles:
Close-up of a Scheduler task card showing a red colour bar down its left edge, a resolution checkbox, the work-item ID DP-39 as a link followed by the title, and a right-aligned fields line reading 5d next to a status icon; a chain handle and a calendar-with-a-cross handle sit in the top-right corner and a tooltip below lists Project, Type, Status and Assignee(s)

A hovered card: the Add Link chain and Unplan item calendar-with-a-cross handles top right, and the hover tooltip underneath with the title, the date range, and the configured Tooltip Fields.

Neither handle appears on cards in the Unplanned sidebar — those cards are dragged onto the board rather than edited in place.
A resolved work item is read-only on the board: its card cannot be dragged, and the Unplan item handle is not offered. To reschedule it, reopen the work item in Polarion first.
Clicking the body of a card — anywhere other than the ID link or the handles — opens the work item in Polarion’s work-item sidebar, and the board remembers your selection across a reload.

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Which colour wins

Several states can apply to the same task at once, so Scheduler resolves them in a fixed order. The first match decides the card’s colour:
1

Overloaded — red

The task asks for more hours than its swimlane can absorb over the days the bar spans. This wins over everything else, including a resolution: an overloaded card is red even if it is finished.
2

Resolved — grey, read-only

The work item has a resolution set. Grey also means the card is read-only: it cannot be dragged, and it offers no Unplan item handle.
3

Overdue — red

Today is past the work item’s due date. An overdue task also adds a red Overdue line, with the due date, at the bottom of its hover tooltip.
4

Otherwise — the work item's status colour

With none of the above applying, the card takes the colour configured for its status in the project’s work-item status enumeration. This is the normal case, and it is why a healthy board reads like your Polarion statuses rather than like a traffic light.
Scheduler board showing task cards in different colour states: a red-barred card on the Ayato Seller row for an overloaded task, yellow and blue status-coloured cards on the Jai Requirement and Melanie Test rows, and a grey read-only card with a struck-through work-item ID and a tick on the Steve Developer row

Three of the four outcomes on one board: an overloaded card in red at the top, status-coloured cards in the middle, and a resolved card in grey with a struck-through ID at the bottom.

Because overload is evaluated per day and re-evaluated whenever the board redraws, a card can change colour without the work item changing. Dragging a neighbouring task off a busy day, or shortening it, is enough to take a red card back to its status colour.

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The four load bands

In the timeline view, every day cell of a swimlane’s summary row carries a load marker: the hours scheduled into that day for that swimlane, over the swimlane’s capacity for the day — for example 15.3 / 8. The marker’s background is one of four bands:
Per-day load markers on collapsed swimlane rows: the Ayato Seller row reads 15.3/8, 13.3/8 and 13.3/8 and the Chaitali User row reads 10.8/8 across nine days, all on a salmon-red background, while five other rows show empty cells with no numbers

Markers in the High band: 15.3 / 8, 13.3 / 8 and 10.8 / 8 are all past an eight-hour day, so every cell is salmon red — the rows with nothing scheduled print no figures at all.

Capacity depends on what the swimlane represents:
Enumeration rows are filled against a 24-hour day rather than a working day, so their markers turn red far later than a user row’s would. Read them as a relative picture of where work is piling up, not as a person’s workload. See Capacity and Load.

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How a task contributes to a day

A task’s effort — the figure chosen by Plans Type — is spread across the working days its bar covers, and each of those days receives its share. Two consequences worth knowing:
  • A long bar is a light bar. The same effort stretched over more days lands less load on each of them, which is often the quickest way to clear a red day.
  • Over 100% is normal to see, not a data error. A high marker simply means the hours booked into that day exceed the capacity of the row. It is the signal to reschedule, not a fault.
An overload also travels to the card: any task whose own share exceeds the day’s capacity turns red, which is the first rule in Which colour wins.

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See Also