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These concepts apply to all investment and capacity planning adoption pathways
Audience |
Portfolio manager, PMO, EPMO, portfolio board, finance manager, Planview administrator |
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Understand the fundamentals of investment and capacity planning including the data sources and principle steps involved. Select your organizational use case to learn how to quickly set up and get started using Planning at your organization. |
What is investment and capacity planning?
To get started with set up for your organization's planning structure, use the interactive guide below. |
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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.
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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.
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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: |
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Where does the data come from?
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. |
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The five principle steps of investment and capacity planning
These steps represent the full usage of investment and capacity planning:
- 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.
- 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).
- Prioritize and rank: Bring all decision-making factors into a single place for data-driven analysis, prioritization and ranking.
- Model alternatives as scenarios: understand the "what ifs" – model changes to demand, budgeting, staffing and investment to understand the impact on portfolio decisions.
- 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 this process in detail.
Where does planning happen in an organization?
Select your organizational use case for Planning
In investment and capacity planning, a planning portfolio defines the capacity and demand entities to be analyzed and balanced.
To start using investment and capacity planning, you must first determine which capacity and demand entities you want to evaluate. Capacity can be derived from cost centers, work, strategies, or outcomes. Demand can be derived from work, strategies, or outcomes.
The table below describes the most common use cases for planning portfolios.
Select the most relevant use case for your organization to explore design and set up recommendations
Top-down work planning |
Strategic planning |
Product/outcome planning |
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Program planning can be used to plan the projects and work that will deliver a program. |
Strategic planning can be used to determine the breakdown of strategic funding/budgets into the initiatives and programs that will deliver the strategy. |
Product/outcome planning can be used to plan investments in new products or the development of products. |
Go to Top-down work planning>> | Go to Cost center planning>> | Go to Program planning>> | Coming soon | Coming soon |