IT Planning: What's New in January 31, 2018 Release (ver. 2.18)

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IT Planning: What's New in January 31, 2018 Release (ver. 2.18) 

Wed November 15, 2017 02:11 PM

In this release:

Simplified Approvals

We’re enhancing the approval workflow to support hierarchical workflows including the ability to interact with group level plans. This will support a planning process that engages multiple levels of the organizational hierarchy. Group Cost Object Owners will be able to submit, approve or return their group-level budget instead of approving/returning each child cost object individually (Learn more).

 

Simplified Approvals includes the following:

  • Align approvers with the Cost Object hierarchy with flexibility to skip levels
  • Support for group-level interactions (submit, approve, return) and status
  • Status page optimized for owners with multiple Cost Objects
  • Reduce email notifications when plans are submitted, approved or returned
    • When a plan is submitted, an email notification will be sent to owners of the immediate parent.
    • When a plan is returned, an email notification will be sent to owners of the immediate parent in addition to notifying owners of the returned Cost Object.
    • Submitting a Group Cost Object auto-approves all unapproved children and notifies owners of the approved children.

 

Learn more about Simplified Approvals and see the feature in action:

 

There are a few things to keep in mind:

  • You can start the upgrade process while you have active plans. The changes will not take effect until you complete the upgrade.
  • Once the upgrade is complete the hierarchical approval workflow will take effect immediately across all plans regardless of plan state.
  • Further updates to Cost Object Permissions are reflected immediately.

 

If you have any questions, add a comment below or contact your Apptio Customer Success Manager.

 

How do I enable Simplified Approvals?

Admin users can start the upgrade process by clicking Enable Simplified Approvals from the banner (the banner is visible in Reference Data or any Planning Line Item page). Note that changes will not go into effect until you complete the upgrade process. You can cancel the upgrade at any time during the process. 

 

You will be navigated to the new Cost Object Permissions page to set up your approval hierarchy. Select to view the table as a Hierarchy or a List. The Hierarchy view shows the latest published Cost Object hierarchy while the List view shows all users assigned to any Cost Object (including historical Cost Objects that are no longer in the latest published version) in a list view. The system will use your existing Cost Object Permissions to make a best-guess at aligning your current permissions to the new approval hierarchy. TIP: If you updated Cost Objects (Departments, Projects, Services or Business Units) reference data and the Hierarchy view is not displaying those changes, create a new plan or update reference data on an existing plan. 

 

Using the Hierarchy view, assign users as an Owner or Viewer to each level in your Cost Object hierarchy by clicking the edit icon and selecting the username(s). Owners have Edit & Submit permission for that Cost Object-level including any children Cost Objects while Viewers have view-only permission. 

 

To skip a level in the approval workflow, do not assign an Owner to that level in the hierarchy. All children Cost Objects will roll-up to the next level in the hierarchy where an Owner is assigned. 

 

Once you've finished setting up your approval hierarchy click Finish in the banner. The new permissions will take effect immediately for all plans. Note that you can cancel the upgrade at any time by clicking Cancel in the banner. You will lose any changes in Cost Object Permissions and will revert back to the current published permissions.

 

Have a minute? We’re collecting feedback to further improve Simplified Approvals

Click on the banner on the Status page to rate your experience. You can submit feedback as many times as you like, but please do not send Apptio Support questions from here. If you need to report an issue, contact your organization’s IT Planning Admin. 

 

 

Demand vs. Capacity View*

*Requires Project Financial Planning or Service Demand Planning (How?)

 

We now support the ability to compare project labor demand to labor capacity. Department owners have been able to allocate their resources (people) to labor pools, and projects could estimate labor costs by forecasting the number of hours needed from a particular labor pool.  But up until now, a Department/resource owner could only see how much time they had allocated to labor pools; they could not see how much demand projects had for their resources.  With this release, you can now view project labor demand against labor pools, and compare that directly to the allocated pool capacity (in hours or FTEs) (Learn more).

 

Demand vs. Capacity

 

Labor Allocations Import*

*Requires Project Financial Planning or Service Demand Planning (How?)

 

Related to the prior feature, we now support the ability to directly import a list of resource allocations.  Prior to this, each allocation had to be manually entered on each individual labor resource (Learn more).

 

Allocation import

 

For information on our release and maintenance schedule, refer to IT Planning Release & Maintenance Schedule 


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Comments

Wed February 07, 2018 08:31 AM

The hierarchy view is a much better way to present that data.  So much easier to digest.   


#ApptioPlanning(ITP/ITFMF)

Fri February 02, 2018 03:20 PM

LOVE the new Hierarchy view, it really helps with getting a handle on user permissions!


#ApptioPlanning(ITP/ITFMF)