I have got mixed responses on this so I thought I'd as it here.  Do you guys include Project (non-recurring) $ in your Towere/SubTowers for Benchmarking?  I've heard of people doing this both ways.  It's a significant number for us so would make a big difference on the Benchmarks results.

Not sure if this would help. We have a customized benchmarking model where we allocate specific project costs to ITRT using weighted value.

Included but clearly labeled

We have excluded all project costs from Towers and Sub-towers. We only have them in Cost Pools but steer them to a separate bucket, called Projects. We do this on accounting level.

Excluded as recommended by the Jumpstart project team.  The projects object bypasses but runs parallel to towers, with inbound costs from cost source and outbound to apps and services.

Hi. I guess the benchmark topic for me can be a discussion on itself, which for me.. has a lot of issues. 

Since we are discussing in here, how it is even possible to suggest bypassing the IT Towers layer? Since the whole benchmark capability is based on that, how can Apptio really present trustworthy figures for benchmark, if organizations can do "whatever" they like on their cost models?

Additionally, on the TBM framework (below), projects are represented on top of the IT Tower whereas in Apptio model it is below/parallel. Why the difference? Thanks for the help

On my comment above, I remember the rationale being that a lot of projects include one-time costs that could potentially skew tower spend.