The Summary View in IT Planning can be very helpful to quickly isolate areas that might warrant a deeper dive.  This is particularly true when using the Compare To capability, whether comparing to Plan, another Forecast or Actuals.  It's a great feature with excellent graphics but the challenge is making sure that attribution on both sides of the comparison is consistent.  For example, our Internal Labor isn't assigned to an IT Resource Tower in ITP.  It doesn't happen until it has gone through our Cost Transparency model leaving me trying to compare a Forecast that is say 50% assigned to Towers against Actuals which are 100% assigned to Towers.  

I've been experimenting with bringing the output of Cost Transparency back into a reporting version of the Plan (or Forecast) upon which it was based.  Right now I'm focused on enabling IT Resource Tower comparisons but may also tackle a Services version of it.

Is anybody doing something similar and what have knowledge/advice can you share from your experience ?

Hey @George McElfresh - We see this type of thing a lot.  ITP is a great planning tool, but sometimes you can't compare apples to apples without a little CT mapping help.

We have had to pull data from ITP into CT to leverage lookups and lookupexs to finalize the allocations or bring in additional attributes.

While this process is relatively simple, there are a few things you may run into:

1) Design the process so that it is repeatable and well documented.

2) Because you are going to be re-importing your plan from CT into ITP, you will lose some of the functionality as everything is going to end up on the Other tab.  If you are using this purely for reporting, and won't need to adjust the plan or leverage for a baseline, then you are good to go.

@Chrystie Lambert leverages a process like this for their budget process, and may be able to give some additional insights into the things to keep in mind.

Thanks,

Ryan