Budget Planning Overview

Budget Planning Overview Video

The Budget Planning page provides a time-phased view where budget planners can evaluate cost constraints over the entire planning horizon and make the right project selections. This is where the detailed budget planning occurs.

Create a budget plan and select the right projects to execute for a specific planning period or budget cycle. Creating scenarios is a core process of the budget planning process. Scenarios are used to decide the best group of projects for each planning period. Budget planners use scenarios to create multiple what-if options and select different combinations of projects for the plan year.

The Published Views page contains customized layouts of the Budget Planning page so budget planners can focus on project attributes besides budget. Opening a published view display it on the Selection Analysis page. The same processes can be performed on both pages.

Use the Budget Planning page to:

• Review the time-phased planned budget or forecasted costs entered by the project manager, and choose to link to those costs or propose an alternative budget.
• Review the Capital and Expense breakdown cost curves associated with each project. These breakdowns can be viewed in both the Project and Program views on the Budget Planning page.
• Assign and allocate funds to the projects in your portfolio.
• Review the project start and end dates entered by the project manager, and propose revised dates based on budget allocations.
• Select the subset of projects for inclusion in the budget plan.
• Use the Efficient Frontier optimization tool to suggest an optimal selection of projects for inclusion in the budget plan.
• Create multiple plan scenarios to model a variety of plans based on different sets of criteria.
• Send scenarios out for review to stakeholders in the planning group to evaluate the mix of projects.
• Send the candidate scenario to project managers to negotiate the budget and project start and end dates with the project manager for each project.
• Send the final scenario out for final approval, and then approve the plan.
• Communicate with the planning group and project managers that have access to the projects within the scenarios.