I see quite a lot of people here on the Community use ITPF.  I was wondering, what would you say is the top 3 benefits you have seen in using IT Planning in your organisation? 

This what I have seen with customers I have deployed to.

1. Improve the time to create and approve a plan. This is done through collaboratively working on a plan between Cost Center owners and Budget owners.
2. Compare Budget to Forecast to Target. and compare various revisions of budgets
3. Have a direct linkage between the organisation's budgeting process (IT Planning) and Cost Transparency and have detailed reports on those two dimensions

In addition to Michael's benefits stated above when helping clients implement ITPF I have found:

1.You no longer have to manage multiple spreadsheets. Everything is kept in ITPF. This includes multiple Cost centers' budgets, multiple versions of plans/forecasts and multiple plans/forecasts.

2. Found double budgeted line items very easily when everything was loaded into the tool as spreadsheets got consolidated.

3. Can budget at a more granular level. I.E instead of getting a lump sum for labor, contracts and assets you can easily break it down by: headcount, contract start/end and number of assets.

We did not implement IT Planning at our organization yet, but the first bullet here, about no longer have to use spreadsheets send around the organization without a really good output, is a very good benefit!

Thanks a lot for the feedback - quite interesting for a newcomer
What were the challenges/problems for implementing IT Planning (if any)?

Interested in learning about implementation challenges as well - benefits, too 

I just started a discussion and asked for feedback - will share it with you in a sec 

Thank you, @Laila Fivian 

My pleasure

We are now implementing IT Planning with @Michael Moulsdale's help.  So far, I would say our biggest challenge has been timing - our finance teams are really busy.  'Chicken and egg' situation really, IT Planning will save them lots of time, but the don't have the time to help us implement!  we're having to balance our plan around not too much pressure on our finance colleagues but enough momentum to implement a successful solution.

Good news, it does seem to be going ok so far, so fingers crossed for success.

Thanks a mil for your feedback Sasha - it's highly appreciated!

True, finance has often work peaks during the monthly closings - important to consider this during the implementation. Very good and useful input, thank you
I hope the implementation on your side will keep going smoothly. Cross my fingers as well

From my perspective, the biggest ITP benefits we experienced were that ITP helped us get TBM and ATUM concepts and taxonomy in front of more people more quickly.  It also resulted in us having a plan in a tool that spoke the same language as Cost Transparency instead of having to maintain a translation layer between CT and our former planning tool (IBM Cognos TM1).  Lastly it sets us up to take advantage of capabilities like SDP and PFP.

We've been using ITP for a little less than a year now and for our organization the top 3 benefits we have experienced:

1. It got our teams away from maintaining multiple monthly spreadsheets and instead allowed Apptio to become the source of record.

2.  While going through our budgeting process it allowed cost center owners to team with finance to build detailed budgets that were broken down to a line item level compared to previous years where it was a very high level process without much input from cost center owners.

3. It allowed our cost center owners to be much more proactive in their planning, adjusting their forecasts when they were trending above budget or targets and at the same time having the detail to explain why. 

We've now completed 2 successful annual budget cycles with using IT planning. Our benefits are as follows: 

1. Removed manual spreadsheets and antiquated approval process via email confirmations back and forth. IT planning becomes the book of record. Removed manual spreadsheets for capital purchases and amortization and allowed the system to properly calculate and tag it.

2. Allows for instant and dynamic reporting which allows for comparison to actuals, targets, previous budget years by any of the attributes that are important to your company. 

3. Cost Center owners are highly involved, responsible and accountable for their budgets. They are now interested in using this tool to compare actuals to budgets and are now able to make additional business decisions off of it. 

4. We implemented a tagging column so that we could tag our specific GL account line items to a IT sub tower element so that we could create a more data driven allocation model as opposed to an assumptive based allocation model when moving it from IT planning to Cost Transparency. This also allowed us to get rid of hundreds of spreadsheets that were previously used to fulfill that need. 

I have other benefits as well.. but I'm already over my 3  

Thanks! 

- Kelly 

We've been using ITPF for over a year now and the top 3 benefits for us are:

1) single source of truth for all forecast data. Not having multiple versions of spreadsheets has made it really efficient for all to know exactly where to look and what the official numbers are. If it's not in ITPF, it's not in the forecast.

2) the reporting in ITPF has made it really easy to see what has changed since previous forecasts and where there are anomalies in trends. Again, this makes it efficient to know who to talk to when wanting to understand variances. The recent addition of the filtering feature has really helped us in this regard. 

3) multi-currency is quite important for us as we operate in 30+ countries so being able to quickly view forecasts in all currencies has saved us lots of time and again, having it all in a system ensures that everyone is using the same FX rates.

Also worth mentioning that, being a SaaS application, we've really appreciated the continuous updates to ITPF and the IT Planning and Financial Management Feature Ideas section in community which allows us (customers) to provide a steer for future releases

Great feedback. We are using very similar topics in our PPTs.