Project Portfolio Planning

Estimate the high-level resource costs required to deliver the work.

​Resource managers can plan resource costs by entering role-level project demand directly into the financial plan in either FTEs or days. This demand is associated with certain resource details such as organizational role and location. The application then determines the costs of the resources based on their attribute categorization and estimated effort.

For the purpose of balancing capacity with demand during investment and capacity planning, an administrator can load the capacity of a cost-center based financial plan for either a portfolio of cost centers or all cost centers. Administrators can load this capacity immediately or can schedule the load.

Estimate the high-level non-resource costs required to deliver the work. Project managers can use the Financial Planning Detail Screen to enter this data manually or use expenditures.

Ensure the project business case attributes are correct and current, which can help drive a business case analytic output.

The business case can include forecast financial data, planned schedule and milestone dates, and the core attributes derived from the organizational data model. Project managers can use the WRK13 – Project (and Portfolio) Business Case report to see a summary of key business case information on a single project or across a portfolio of projects.

Build a project budget by creating an initial estimate of the costs needed to deliver the project. Project managers can take a baseline of the financial plan for the project to capture a snapshot of the original budget. They can then compare this baseline with future baselines to monitor the progress of the project. Financial Baselines are created by copying the current forecast version in to a baseline version. This can be done manually or as part of a lifecycle step.

For more information, see Understand Financial Models and Versions.

Update the project financial plan with the actual costs incurred in a historical time period to capture an accurate representation of the project's expenditure. This information can be used as a comparison against the project budget or previous baselines to track variances against the estimated spend.

Costs can be loaded from the project plan or captured directly on the financial plan, including the following information:

• Labor: Labor costs are calculated based on defined labor rates. If time reporting is in use, processed timesheets or Agile costing data are integrated into the project plan and will also be reflected on the financial plan.
• Expenditures: Non-labor costs can be captured as planned, unplanned, and actual expenditures on the project plan.

Ensure the project financial plan accurately reflects the estimated resource costs and effort required to deliver the project. This up-to-date cost and effort information helps managers understand the impact of the pending resource costs of the project on the portfolio.

Make sure that resource demand and assignments information is current to ensure that the financial plan accurately represents the forecasted costs.

Manage forecasted benefits and/or revenue

Ensure the project financial plan accurately reflects the estimated benefits of delivering the project to provide an accurate forecast of the predicted revenue.

Update the benefit costs—which were previously populated in the original estimation or previous rounds of reforecasting—directly into the financial plan to reflect the latest and most accurate forecast. These amounts should continue to be associated with the appropriate benefit sub-account information depending on your configuration to help categorize the revenue and allow portfolio-level summarization of the types of benefits.

Track the current performance of the project financials against the original budget and use this information to make informed decisions and manage exceptions.

Project managers can use financial versions to compare different financial versions over time. For example, to monitor the financial performance of the project against the original budget and earlier snapshots, the current actual and forecast data in the financial plan can be compared against previous baseline versions.

The process of investment planning allows planners to evaluate the list of proposed investments (projects) to determine which to move forward with.

Analysis of investments is achieved by comparing what’s available, Capacity (which can be in the form of resource capacity or financial a budget against what is required) versus Demand (derived by the forecast of projects in the portfolio).

To carry out and understand portfolio investment planning, it is essential that an accurate recording of your target budget and resource capacity is captured within Planview Enterprise One – PRM. The detail of the summarized capacity totals can be drilled into via the Financial Planning Detail screens associated with each capacity entity.

Based on your Planning portfolio, Capacity Portfolio Manager shows a summarized capacity total broken down by the capacity slicer in the portfolio definition.

For more information, see the following capability:

• Organizational Funding 

Planning portfolios define where and which targets and demand you wish to analyze and for which time range (Planning Horizon).

Demand requirements for analysis:

• Demand must not be in the Investment Approval Status of pending.
• Demand must match the selected capacity.
• Demand must be within the defined Planning Horizon.
• Demand must be part of the additional portfolio definition.

For more information, see the following articles:

• About Creating Planning Portfolios
• Creating Planning Portfolios
• Planning Portfolio Use Cases
• Precise Planning for Parts of your Organization (Out of Portfolio)

Investment and capacity planning lets you define an investment plan in a shared environment by working in investment and capacity planning scenarios that are portfolio-specific. When working in a shared environment, you and other users review the same proposed investment plan so that each of you can examine and update those portions that affect your respective areas.

Investment and capacity planning scenarios let you model different investment decisions and various approaches to balancing investment demand with capacity. By using multiple scenarios, you and other users who have access to a relevant portfolio can work in a what-if environment until it is determined that a particular scenario is ready to be published and thereby shared with others as your organization's investment plan.

For more information about scenarios, see Managing Investment and Capacity Planning Scenarios.

See Using Shared Scenarios within Investment and Capacity Planning for an example of the use of shared scenarios.

The purpose of this step is to Rank your organizational investments to determine their priority.

Investment and Capacity Planning provides a mechanism to compile all investments (accepted, in-flight, and potential projects) and carry out an assessment and approval in the context of the whole portfolio. The Rank view within Investment and Capacity Planning provides the ability to sort the list of investments based on subjective or qualitative scoring and prioritization criteria to determine a priority between the investments within the portfolio. This ranking is then used in subsequent screens in Investment Capacity Planning as sorting criteria.

Investments can be ranked automatically based on criteria and/or manually by the users of each scenario. Investments are displayed in the order that they have been ranked within a scenario. If no ranking has been applied in the scenario, investments are displayed alphabetically. If a scenario includes both ranked and unranked investments, unranked investments will display at the top in alphabetical order, and the ranked investments will display below in ascending order of their ranking.

For more information see the following articles:

• Ranking Investments
• Automatically Rank Investments Based on Criteria
• Dragging Investments to Rank Them
• Defining Threshold Lines for the Rank View
• Removing an Investment's Ranking
• Alerts

Analyze against portfolio targets

Investment and Capacity Planning provides a mechanism to compile all investments (accepted, in-flight and potential projects) and carry out an assessment and approval in the context of the whole portfolio. The Analyze view provides the ability to approve (that is, to set the Investment Approval Status to Accepted) projects by moving them above the line (accepted) and seeing the impact on overall budgetary constraints and capacity. Any changes made to Investment Approval Status and Internal Priority made in the Investment and Capacity screens are "what-if" changes and are not confirmed until the scenario is published to execution.

​The objective of this stage is the process is to confirm the approval of investments within the portfolio targets/constraints of costs and resource capacity.

To analyze investments "above and below the line":

• Investments in this view are displayed in two trays:
  • The upper tray represents above-the-line investments with Accept or Conditionally Accept statuses.
  • Investments in the lower tray represent below-the-line investments with Refuse or Analyze statuses.
• If the investments exceeding targets are in the below-the-line investments, it means that while the total of the portfolio will exceed the targets, the current above-the-line investments will not exceed the target.
• Depending on the selected column set, you can also view different summarized financial information.
• To make investment decisions (to approve or refuse an investment), you can open the action menu () next to each investment to select the desired status. Using the options in this menu, you can also view other information about the investment. Alternatively, you can use a drag-and-drop operation to move the investments between the above the line and below the line trays.

For more information see Updating Investment Approval Status and Priority or Reviewing a Gantt Chart in Investment and Capacity Planning.

The Shift view provides a view of where demand exceeds capacity by period, as well as the ability to shift projects to fit within the available capacity.

After all the investments in a portfolio have been ranked and analyzed, the investment scenarios may be further evaluated to review the date ranges of the approved and conditionally approved investments. There may be constraint limitations on specific resource types that may be resolved by shifting dates of the investments. Investments previously below the line may be able to become approved if the dates are shifted.

For more information see the following articles:

• Shift Investments
• Data Display and Layout of the Shift View
• Shifting Investments to Resolve Capacity Issues

Investment and Capacity Planning provides a mechanism to compile all investments (accepted, in-flight, and potential projects) and carry out an assessment and approval in the context of the whole portfolio. The Balance view allows you to look at investments that have been accepted in the scenario and to look at the time profiled impact of the investments against the capacity and budget targets.

The objective of this stage in the process is to identify resource capacity/demand issues or cost time-phasing issues and to smooth demand across time to plan to deliver the projects within the capacity and time phased budget targets.

To balance Investments:

• In the Balance Investments view, you use the category menu to decide what information you wish to view. In this example, we are viewing Labor Currency. You can also view Labor Effort by selecting Labor and Effort. Depending on your usage model, you can also view Expense, Capitalized Costs, and Benefits.
• This Focus Control option displays the controls available for you to organize the information when you perform drill-down for analysis.
• The controls available allow you to decide how many attributes to be included in the summarization for drill down, by moving them to the left of the focus control bar, then you decide which order they should be presented. The control on the far left will be the first level of drill down, following by attributes to its right.
• Information on the grid at the lowest level is editable when you are viewing a user-created scenario or the Shared Scenario if it is editable.
• Action menus () at the project level provide options to view additional information for the project.
• Action menus at the lowest level provide options to update attributes of the line or to model changes to the demand.
• Action menus from the Capacity levels provide the option to view the financial plan of the selected capacity to model changes to defined capacity.
• Use the Scenario options to change the scenario you are viewing or to create and manage scenarios. It is important to not accidentally model what-if decisions on the Shared Scenario. What-if modeling should be done on user-created scenarios and published to the shared scenario when you are ready to commit to the plan.

For more information see the following articles:

• Updating Capacity and Demand Data in Investment and Capacity Planning
• Changing Account Line Attributes in Investment and Capacity Planning
• Updating Capacity and Demand Data by Accessing the Financial Plan

The purpose of this step is to capture a portfolio baseline in order to create a snapshot of the investment decisions and investments as of the end of the investment planning cycle. As the investment portfolio evolves and the project landscape continues to change, new projects arrive, or planned projects fluctuate in risk, forecasted cost or strategic alignment, a continuous reassessment about the investment decisions and priorities will force amendments to the investment planning portfolio. This working version can then be compared against the baseline and variances analyzed.

After creating versions, it is important to assign the correct Working Version or Comparison Version tags to see their respective values in column sets.

For more information about scenarios, see Managing Investment and Capacity Planning Scenarios.

The Planned Investments comparison view highlights financial differences between the working version and the comparison version.

The top tray compares financial data differences based on the selected column set. The bottom tray compares investment approval status and rank order.

The Approval Decisions view compares Investment Approval statuses for multiple scenarios.

Selection of scenarios is made in the Investment and Capacity Planning screen's preferences. If no scenarios are selected, this screen compares all scenarios. Investments are displayed in the same way as the bottom tray of the Planned Investments comparison view—by Above the Line, Trade-off, and Below the Line.

For more information see the following articles:

• Planned Investments View
• Approval Decisions View
• Compare Investments

The purpose of this step is to publish the investment approval decisions that were made to the scenario during the ranking, analyzing, shifting, and balancing of investments versus organizational capacity. Based on the above-the-line (accepted) and below-the-line decisions made during this investment planning process, the Investment Approval Status values are updated accordingly—all accepted projects will be changed to an Investment Approval Status of Accepted. Investment Approval decisions made in a scenario are "what-if" and not visible and live until the publishing process is completed.

• If the investment approvals have been made in the Shared Scenario then the Publish from the Shared Scenario transaction will make the decisions live.
• If the investment approvals have been made in another (not shared) scenario then the Publish from Scenario can be used to move the investment decisions to just the shared scenario or to the demand as well.

It is important to note that, as well as the investment approval decisions, any amendments to the demand data of investments or the capacity/budget targets within the (non-shared) scenario will also be published to live and will update the financial planning detail screens accordingly for the investments and/or capacity in question.

For more information see the following articles:

• Publishing the Current Version of an Investment Plan as the Official Plan
• Publishing a Scenario in Investment and Capacity Planning
• About Lifecycles and the Publication of the Shared Scenario

The purpose of this step is to change the status of projects which have been refused as part of the portfolio planning process to closed. 

This step can be completed as part of a lifecycle process, or can be done manually.

Lets you do the following:

• Review and manage projects and other work items, logical relationships, action items, and notes for a work item.

• Update a work item's entire schedule, manage baselines, calculate functional estimates, and use experience estimating.
• Access a work item's content and financial planning data.
• Request, assign, and manage resources.
• Create and manage assignments within a single project plan.
• Monitor and respond to resource utilization problems.
• Search for resources and manage staffing demands, such as creating allocations and reserves when filling unfilled requirements.

Analytic