As the budget forecast planner, you can create scenarios to plan an optimal portfolio of projects for the company, based on available budget targets and strategic goals.
Portfolio management entails collaboration and negotiation between you, as the budget forecaster, and the project managers in your company. At their respective project levels, project managers maintain project information and create cash flow budgets and projections in the Cost Manager.
In the Portfolio Manager, on the scenario sheets you create, Unifier collects the budget and projection numbers from the projects’ Cost Managers, as well as project start and end dates from the project information.
During a scenario analysis, you can:
- Apply regional budget targets
- Group the projects in the scenario according to project characteristics
- Sort and filter the rows of project data and analyze the summary totals
- Accept the project managers’ budget numbers or propose new numbers
- Accept the schedule dates, or remove or postpone planned projects
- Create additional scenarios to reflect other possible forecasts
Note: The numbers you propose in a scenario will NOT affect a project’s live data. Your proposed numbers are stored only in the Portfolio Manager and will not affect live project data until a scenario has been approved by your company management.
During this analysis, you will likely be in touch with project managers to negotiate these numbers and dates until you reach agreement.
Project managers will not see the changes you make on the scenario sheet. Instead, the project managers must create a "shared" type of portfolio budget curve. This curve shows your proposed numbers for the project. The project manager can include this curve on the cost worksheet, along with the forecast budget, or any other budget curve, in order to see the difference between the project’s numbers and your proposed budget numbers.
In order for them to see the curve, you must share the scenario (see Share a Scenario (Classic View)).
For information about the portfolio budget curve, see Creating Cash Flow Detail Curves in Projects and Shells.
Once you have completed a budget forecast analysis using these scenarios, you can send the best (or several best) scenario(s) to the executive decision makers for approval by "sharing" the scenario.
Gannt View
Gannt view shows you how capital is used over time. It allows you to quickly adjust schedules to achieve a better combination of projects within schedule and target. You can access a Gannt view of any scenario in which one or more projects is selected for budget planning. Click Gannt in the tool bar to display a Gannt distribution of proposed total over time on the grid. You can open the dialogue of select projects and add projects to the Gannt view.
Make schedule adjustments by moving Gannt bars and adjusting the project schedule. You can view the target and difference rows simultaneously. You can also change start and end dates, and the Gannt view will update accordingly. Click Save or Cancel after making changes.
Note: In the case of a standard planning period and if you have chosen some years as monthly, all Proposal Distribution columns will be displayed in months.
Portfolio Dashboard
The portfolio dashboard allows you to gather insights by looking at visual representations of Risk vs. Benefit, Investment vs. Return on Investment (ROI), and so forth. The dashboard displays all project data that has been selected in Budget Planning of the current scenario. Click Dashboard at the top of the scenario sheet to view the portfolio dashboard. A bubble chart displays alongside six fields with drop-down menus: Chart Type, X-Axis, Y-Axis, Bubble Size, Shape, and Color. Use the drop-down menus to select values for each field. A bubble color legend is displayed below the chart.
Click Reset to change all drop-down values to select.
Click Apply to configure the chart based on your selections.
Click Update to apply your configuration to the chart. The chart configuration saves upon clicking Update.