Help Centre
Getting Started in 10 Minutes
From sign-up to your first probability-backed project plan - follow these seven steps and you'll have a shareable estimate ready in under 10 minutes.
Create a project
After signing in you land on the Projects dashboard. Click New project (top-right) and give your project a name and a target end date. That's all that's required - you can fill in the rest as you go.
Add roles and team members
Open the Team tab inside your project. Add the roles that will work on this project - for example Senior Developer, Designer, QA Engineer. For each role you can set:
- Daily rate - used to calculate the cost summary.
- Capacity - how many hours per day this person is available to the project (defaults to 8).
You don't need real names at this stage. Role-based planning lets you model a project before the team is confirmed.
Create tasks and set t-shirt sizes
Switch to the Gantt view and start adding tasks. For each task you set a t-shirt size - a rough effort estimate:
| Size | Typical effort |
|---|---|
| XS | ½ day |
| S | 1–2 days |
| M | 3–5 days |
| L | 1–2 weeks |
| XL | 2–4 weeks |
Assign each task to a role. AxioPlan will use each role's capacity to work out how the tasks fit into the calendar.
Add risk levels
Every task has an optional risk level: Low, Medium, or High. Risk affects the probability distribution - a High-risk task has a wider spread of possible durations than a Low-risk one.
Use risk to flag tasks that depend on a third-party API, an unclear requirement, or a team member who's never done this type of work before. Marking something as High-risk doesn't make the project later; it makes the probability output honest.
Set dependencies between tasks
On the Gantt, drag from the right edge of one task bar to the left edge of another to create a finish-to-start dependency. The second task can't start until the first is done.
Dependencies are critical to an accurate schedule. Without them, AxioPlan assumes tasks can run in parallel. A few well-placed dependencies will shift your probability outputs significantly.
View the Summary and interpret probability outputs
Click Summary in the project nav. You'll see three delivery date scenarios:
- Optimistic (50th percentile) - there's a 50 % chance you finish by this date. Half of all simulated runs complete here or earlier.
- Most likely (75th percentile) - an 85% confidence date. A solid default for internal planning.
- Safe (95th percentile) - the date you should quote the client. See the explainer below.
The Summary also shows total effort by epic, cost by role, and a breakdown of where the schedule risk sits.
Export a proposal
From the Summary page click Export. You can download:
- PDF summary - a clean, client-ready one-pager with the three delivery scenarios and cost breakdown.
- Shareable link - a read-only live view of the project you can paste directly into an email or a Slack message.
The shareable link updates live - if you adjust the plan after sending it, the client's view reflects the changes automatically.
What does the 85th percentile date mean?
AxioPlan runs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations of your project, each time sampling a slightly different duration for every task based on its size and risk level. The result is a probability distribution - a curve that shows the likelihood of finishing on any given day.
The 85th percentile date is the point where 85 % of simulated runs have already finished. In plain English: if you ran this project 100 times under the same conditions, 85 of those runs would be done by this date.
This is the number to put in a fixed-price proposal. It's not a guarantee - nothing in project management is - but it's an honest, defensible commitment. Quoting the 50th-percentile date means you're expecting to miss the deadline roughly half the time.
When a client asks “can we move the deadline two weeks earlier?” you can open AxioPlan in the meeting, adjust the scope, and show them immediately how that change shifts the probability. That's what rescheduling live on the call means.