Product Funding
Product Funding
The Product Funding capability supports defining financial targets for products for the organization. Each capability within the Planview Capability Framework has a distinct set of features and functionality, business processes, best practices, and analytics and reports that deliver value to customers in the form of specific business outcomes.
Definition and Business Outcomes
Definition
This supports the setting of time-phased financial targets for products, against which planned and in-flight investments can be analyzed.
Business Outcome
We can define and adjust product budgets at various levels that represent the portfolio’s investment.
Business Outcome
We can forecast the costs and effort required to deliver each product, and the benefits and revenue that the product is anticipated to generate.
Best Practices
Align budgets to outcomes
Align funding to your business outcomes to ensure that the end-to-end delivery of your products can be managed more effectively and flexibly. This encourages greater flexibility and autonomy within your value streams, teams, and teams of teams.
Create guardrails for spending
Once you align your budget with your outcomes, create guardrails that define spending policies, guidelines, capacity, and practices across the portfolio. This ensures that the right investments are made within each budget while giving teams the freedom to weigh new opportunities against long-term strategies.
Reassess budgets often
Reassess your budget regularly to analyze investments across value streams and reallocate funds to new initiatives. Continuously monitoring your portfolio enables you to pivot toward new opportunities or away from unsatisfactory projects with greater flexibility and ease.
Budget collaboratively
Create a better-informed and effective system for distributing investments by involving stakeholders and business owners in the budgeting process. Participatory budgeting encourages leaders to share resources to achieve results within their initiative.
Use scenario planning
Scenario planning helps to forecast the cost and benefits of a given selection of product investments. Create and assess various scenarios of different product mixes to ensure the products you choose to invest in can achieve your organization’s strategic goals. For more information, see the Prioritization and Scenario Analysis capability.
Processes and Reports
Product funding supports the ability to set financial targets (benefits and revenue) for each product. A product financial plan is created then baselined to track variances between the forecasted product benefits and revenue and actual costs. This capability supports strategic investment planning by allowing In-flight and potential investments to be analyzed against product financial targets.
Financial Targets Process Steps
Financial targets process flow
| Process Step | Description |
|---|---|
| Create and manage product financial targets (benefits and revenue) | Capture the revenue targets and benefits of launching the product against which actual costs can be compared later. All appropriate data should be populated in the Financial Planning Detail screen for the product. |
| Baseline product financial plan |
Following the input or roll-up of the financial plan budget and target data, a financial baseline for the financial plan should be taken to compare and track variances on the product financials over time. |
Related Capabilities
Roadmapping
This capability supports the translation of strategic ideas into an interactive timeline of business outcomes and deliverables. Roadmaps are used to set direction and communicate with stakeholders throughout delivery.
Read moreProgram Management
This capability supports the monitoring and management of program roadmap realization by tracking the status and health of programs. Data rolled up from dependent projects is used to update the roadmap, manage program delivery, and communicate with stakeholders.
Read moreValue Stream Funding
This capability allows organizations to set financial targets for value stream benefits and revenue, and provides a financial baseline for future investments. Planned and in-flight investments can be analyzed against targets to make strategic decisions.
Read more
Supported Solutions