Get started with the Project Financial Planning module

The tasks below require you license Project Financial Planning then enable Project Financial Planning features. See Edit the Company Profile. Project Financial Planning is an add-on module in the Apptio planning applications family. Project Financial Planning's Portfolio Investment Planning feature can help you to accomplish the following:

• Plan for both proposed and approved project costs
• Compare demand to capacity
• Better support project selection and funding decisions

Apptio planning applications help you plan at the account and Cost Object level for spend on people, assets, and vendors needed to deliver services and projects to achieve your business goals. Project Financial Planning focuses on your "grow the business" investments.

With Project Financial Planning, you can better align the financial planning of IT resources and projects with business objectives.

Many functions in your organization can benefit from Project Financial Planning to holistically see investment budget and operational budget, and to see in detail how project spend impacts the overall IT budget. Project Financial Planning also offers the following benefits to other functions in your organization:

• CIOs and IT leaders can better run a business, change a business' costs, and see financial impacts of a project over multiple years.
• Infrastructure and operations managers can budget the costs of dedicated and shared assets, labor, and contracts needed for project delivery.
• Project managers and Project Owners can budget build and run costs, capitalize resource costs, and model out-year run costs.

Project Financial Planning not only applies to funded projects but also to proposed new projects, giving you greater visibility across your portfolio. Apptio calls this capability Portfolio Investment Planning. Modeling new projects this way helps you better align your IT investments with business needs.

Here is one way to visualize the full spectrum from investment planning to project budgeting and forecasting:

The previous image summarizes the following sequence:

(1) Intake - As part of an annual and ongoing planning process, business cases or funding requests get submitted via an intake process (the project pipeline). These requests get combined with any deferred or carry-over projects and are reviewed for funding.

(2) Selection - All these projects compete for portions of the same resources and funds. A part of this decision-making process is to weigh the various costs each project will incur against expected benefits.

(3) Execution - Once the project selection decisions are made, Project Owners build more detailed plans before execution begins.

(4) Re-prioritization - Then, after the budget is finalized and the fiscal year begins, the cost and performance of each project, along with new project requests, are analyzed to reshape the optimal mix of investments.

The project financial governance process is normally a challenging and time-consuming effort. Consequently, many organizations have not been able to shift as quickly as they'd like to meet changing priorities. Apptio Project Financial Planning is designed to give you quicker access to better information and analytics to support a more agile planning process. To learn more, see Best practices: Investment planning in Project Financial Planning.

Complete the following tasks to configure and use Project Financial Planning.