Portfolio planners can create a portfolio for a specific "planning horizon" (for example, from 2020 through 2026) and then create multiple scenarios in that portfolio.
Each scenario can use forecast numbers and actuals for both planned and active projects.
The portfolio scenario sheets have been set up to pull in the following data from your projects:
- General project information
- Project start and end dates
- Cash flow data (both forecasted and actual) from each project’s Cost Manager
With this data, planners can forecast costs over a specific time period (called a "planning period"). They can then manipulate scenarios by:
- Including or excluding projects
- Pushing start dates for planned projects into the future
- Modify project end dates to change the project’s duration
- Proposing different cash flow distribution numbers by manually editing the cash flow columns
- Negotiating proposed budgets with project managers
Once these scenario analyses have been completed, the best scenarios can be sent to the executive decision makers for approval.
Once a scenario has been approved, Unifier:
- Marks the approved scenario "shared" so that project managers can see the approved dates and numbers. The scenario is set to read-only mode and can no longer be modified or deleted.
- Updates each projects’ original budget numbers with the proposed numbers on the approved scenario.
- Updates each projects’ monthly or yearly cash flow numbers with the proposed numbers on the approved scenario.
- Updates the project start date (if it was changed) for any planned projects that will begin during the portfolio’s planning period.
- Locks the budget and cash flow numbers to prevent any further changes.
With Primavera Capital Planning (PCP), you receive a template for the portfolio scenario sheets that you use to create the scenarios for analyzing and forecasting capital budgets. The template has been set up to automatically add all your active projects to the sheet as rows.
The template contains:
- The planning options for the portfolio scenario sheet, such as the period structure and data linking options
- Project phases that identify a project as planned or in execution
- The data sources to be used for the analysis, such as project dates and cash flow sources
- The query that will extract the project data that should be included on the scenario
- The column layout that will appear on the scenario sheet
In general, a portfolio scenario sheet contains a list of available projects in a given scenario. See the Project Portfolio Manager section for more details. Unifier populates the portfolio scenario sheet with all the projects that have met the criteria for inclusion (the budget and projection numbers are from Cost Managers node, and the project start and end dates are from project information). See Creating a New Portfolio Scenario Sheet section for more details.