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These concepts apply to all investment and capacity planning adoption pathways  

What is investment and capacity planning?  

	Planview Portfolios investment and capacity planning enables organizations to balance demand against capacity constraints to create an investment plan that ensures you are: Investing to position your company for both today's new reality and for future growth Balancing long-term success with short-term cost cuts Getting the right things done and delivering value from your investments Able to pivot when budget or resource capacity changes   To get started with set up for your organization's planning structure, use the interactive guide below.
TIP Planview Professional Services is available to support your deployment of Planview Investment and Capacity Planning capabilities. For more details, refer to the Planview Portfolios Capability Adoption Package: Investment and Capacity Planning.
Investment and capacity planning is a collection of capabilities that supports portfolio planning. It takes into consideration three main dimensions: capacity, demand, and time. Investment and capacity planning brings these dimensions together for review and analysis and allows for data-driven decisions on where and when to invest in money and resources to achieve the desired outcomes.

How does investment and capacity planning solve problems?

Planning is the key to focusing on what matters. By enabling investment and capacity planning within Portfolios, you can achieve the visibility you need to prioritize demands in line with strategic goals. Understanding how to get started with planning in your organization can allow you to adopt a better planning process to realize benefits at each level, no matter where you decide to start. 
 

In your role:	Planning helps to:
	Prioritize and fund cross-functional initiatives to allow investment decisions to reflect strategic priorities, risks, constraints, and capacity and demand in real-time.
	Surface and bring understanding to bottlenecks and dependencies in your project, program, or product-based portfolios. Balance resource capacity with demand to gain a complete view of where resources are allocated and what they are doing to better communicate issues and constraints to leadership.
	Prioritize projects against program budgets to create a single pane of glass across all of your initiatives, aligning capacity to the highest priority work to give teams the autonomy and time for continuous improvement and innovation.

Where does the data come from?

Investment and capacity planning uses data from financial planning. Two sets of financial data must exist, which represent capacity and demand, in order to bring visibility to your portfolio plans, funding, capacity and work.  The capacity comes from entities in the organization that store budgets, targets, and resource capacity. The demand comes from entities that are "demanding" from those financial budgets or resource capacity, and are expected to deliver on the specified targets.  Note that on each financial plan, the accounts are the same between capacity and demand. This is important because to be able to analyze and balance demand against capacity, you need to be looking at the same categories of data on both sides of the scale.

The five principle steps of investment and capacity planning

These steps represent the full usage of investment and capacity planning:

1. Determine capacity: Identify what you want to achieve (targets), the budgetary limits, and resource capacity constraints. This data will then be captured in a financial plan version for your capacity entity or entities.  
2. Identify demand: Define the set of investments you want to make decisions for. Use a standardized categorization, scoring and estimation process to capture relevant financial planning data and any additional attributes that help set the priority for your demand entities (for example, priority score, strategic alignment, and regulatory).
3. Prioritize and rank: Bring all decision-making factors into a single place for data-driven analysis, prioritization and ranking.
4. Model alternatives as scenarios: understand the "what ifs" – model changes to demand, budgeting, staffing and investment to understand the impact on portfolio decisions. 
5. Choose and publish a plan: Compare and contrast different scenarios to understand the tradeoffs before choosing the best course of action. 

However, not every step is required for it to be meaningful and beneficial. Some customers start with simply determining capacity and demand, then ranking and prioritizing investments without using the more advanced scenario analysis and reporting options. 

There is flexibility, especially when getting started. Think about the key steps that your organization needs to take in order to make decisions about your portfolio plan and focus on those as your initial process. 
 

Watch the video below to see the full investment and capacity planning process.