Role-based Capacity Planning

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).

The Capacity data is created and maintained in Capacity Portfolio Manager on the capacity financial plan, maintained by the planners it is entered as resource effort or costs and available capital expenditure spend.

The Demand data comes from the financial plans of the projects in the portfolio that is either estimated during the project intake process or maintained for in-flight projects through the execution process cycle.

Analyzing the Demand versus the Capacity data for the portfolio in the Investment Capacity Planning screen will enable an organization to ensure the right resources are available at the right time, and that they stay within available budgets for labor and non-labor costs.

If Benefits, revenue or cost savings are tracked, this information can also be used as part of the analysis. The Benefits, revenue or cost savings produced from each project can be used to compare with the Benefit Targets to determine which list of projects will allow the organization to meet its goals.

The Investment Status of a project represents its current stage in the portfolio planning cycle.  All projects that have come through the project intake process (Project Information capability) will have a status of Analyze. All projects that are confirmed as "above the line" (agreed as worthy of investment) will leave the investment planning cycle with the status of Accepted.

In order 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 in to 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 About Creating Planning Portfolios, Creating Planning Portfolios, or Precise Planning for Parts of your Organization (Out of Portfolio). 

Milestones and Releases at the program level are added directly from the Strategy View screen.

The color of the displayed milestones and releases are specified in the Strategy Portfolio Preferences.

Program Roadmap graphically represents the schedule of strategic entities, allocated work,  outcomes, milestones and releases of a strategic plan.

At the program level, 2 sets of dates are visible:

• Target dates represent the planned dates for the program.
• Actual/Schedule dates represent the earliest start and latest finish of associated entities.

For more information see Strategy View Screen Basics, Strategy Roadmap, Customizing the Strategy Roadmap's Display, Reviewing Milestones on the Strategy Roadmap, or Strategic Milestones. 

1. Demand must not be in the Investment Approval Status of Pending.
2. Demand must match the selected Capacity.
3. Demand must be within the defined Planning Horizon
4. Demand must be part of the additional portfolio definition.

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. More information, including an example, about the use of shared scenarios can be found by clicking Using Shared Scenarios within Investment and Capacity Planning. 

Investment and Capacity Planning provides a mechanism to collect together all investments (accepted, in-flight, and potential projects) and carry out an assessment and approval in the context of the whole portfolio. The Rank Pivot 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 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.

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

For more information see 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, and Alerts.

Investment and Capacity Planning provides a mechanism to collect together all investments (accepted, in-flight and potential projects) and carry out an assessment and approval in the context of the whole portfolio. The Analyze Pivot view view provides the ability to “approve” (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":

1. Investments in this view are displayed in two trays. The upper tray represents above-the-line investments with Accept or Conditionally Accept statuses.
2. Investments in the lower tray represent below-the-line investments with Refuse or Analyze statuses.
3. 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.
4. Depending on the selected column set, you can also view different summarized financial information.
5. 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. In this menu, you can also view other information about the investment. Alternately, you can use the drag-and-drop feature to move the investments between the above the line and below the line trays.

           

           

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

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 Shift Investments, Data Display and Layout of the Shift View, or Shifting Investments to Resolve Capacity Issues. 

Investment and Capacity Planning provides a mechanism to collect together all investments (accepted, in-flight, and potential projects) and carry out an assessment and approval in the context of the whole portfolio. The Balance Pivot view 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:

1. 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 Effort. You can also view Labor Cost by selecting Labor and Currency. Depending on your usage model, you can also view Expense, Capitalized Costs, and Benefits.
2. This Focus control toggle will display the controls available for you to organize the information when you perform drill-down for analysis.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Action menus at the project level provide options to view additional information for the project.
6. Action menus at the lowest level provide options to update attributes of the line, to model changes to the demand and also to compare with the underlying project plan.
7. Action menus from the Capacity levels provide the option to view the financial plan of the selected capacity to model changes to defined capacity.
8. Use the Scenario menu to change the scenario viewed 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 Updating Capacity and Demand Data in Investment and Capacity Planning, Changing Account Line Attributes in Investment and Capacity Planning, or Updating Capacity and Demand Data by Accessing the Financial Plan.