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Each year we run a cycle of annual planning, looking forward to the next 3 years or so, assessing existing and new candidate strategies and allocating budgets - an iterative approach which can take some months to complete, balancing off the ambition vs the budget.

 

But this isn’t just about balancing the budget - Part of this exercise focuses on the resource capacity to manage the change, and whilst this should play a critical part in sequencing and ‘doability’ planning, we're finding this difficult to perform within Planview & keen to understand how others take resource capacity into account.

 

I assume we could make use of the functionality on ICP, but to do this, we’d need to spec out all candidate projects - using planning best practice that would mean building representative WBS's for everything, even when solutions are unclear, then creating the requirements against the WBS. Alternatively we can come up with some resource planning line for the duration of the delivery and raise requirements against this, knowing full well this kind of resource planning has issues and will need to be dropped and rebuilt once projects are mobilised, leading to some significant inefficiency.

 

What we really need is a top-down strategic view on potential resource capacity which doesn’t involve building lots of project plans from the bottom up.  I'm sure this isn’t a unique use case & keen to understand how others tackle this - whether this is within Planview or through other tools. 

 

In part this is a consequence of a project delivery model - I’d suspect transitioning to more of a product focused delivery model would mitigate this kind of need.  I'd also be keen to hear from anyone who can share experience of this!

In this case, customers would generally use Financial Planning to lay out high level month over month expectations for 1+ years out by month or quarter.  This can be in your existing Financial Planing Model, or if that is too detailed, some customers do create a simpler Financial Planning Model configuration (typically with less line attributes). 

 

You can do this by project or if that is too detailed by program (in the Strategy structure).  Some customers find that doing by program is sufficient detail and again a way to simplify the process.

 

Finally, you are correct that you could choose to load the resource needs from project plans where they exist and go out far enough.  For most planning this far out however, the work owner is tasked with going into Financial Planning directly and entering the expected need.  They can choose to start by loading the data from their project plan (if they have one) and adjust. Or they can just enter it directly in the Financial Planning screen. They can also use Excel to import / export from that screen. 

 

That’s a lot of content/ideas there. Let me know if that helps. If you have any follow-up, please let either myself or your account team know.  Of course happy to sit down and discuss further.

In this case, customers would generally use Financial Planning to lay out high level month over month expectations for 1+ years out by month or quarter.  This can be in your existing Financial Planing Model, or if that is too detailed, some customers do create a simpler Financial Planning Model configuration (typically with less line attributes). 

 

You can do this by project or if that is too detailed by program (in the Strategy structure).  Some customers find that doing by program is sufficient detail and again a way to simplify the process.

 

Finally, you are correct that you could choose to load the resource needs from project plans where they exist and go out far enough.  For most planning this far out however, the work owner is tasked with going into Financial Planning directly and entering the expected need.  They can choose to start by loading the data from their project plan (if they have one) and adjust. Or they can just enter it directly in the Financial Planning screen. They can also use Excel to import / export from that screen. 

 

That’s a lot of content/ideas there. Let me know if that helps. If you have any follow-up, please let either myself or your account team know.  Of course happy to sit down and discuss further.

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