I'm trying to build a report that is sliced by business unit, but includes the allocations of business services and the two components of the services: projects and IT towers. Apptio is telling me that I can't lookup across 3 objects. Any creative ways to get this info all into one report?

Cannot lookup across 3 objects: 'Business Services', 'IT Resource Towers' and 'Projects'

Here's a screen shot of the report. When I click the column picker for Project Name, it works.

Here's a screen shot of the report when I click the column picker for IT Resource Tower. It works.

but when I want all three.....

Hi Kyle,

One option may be to provide one of those 3 pieces of information in the data-set that is backing one of the two other objects - effectively removing the reliance on a third object. For example, if you could build IT Resource Tower Name (as a column) into the Business Services Object backing data-set, and build the picker to pull the ITRT name from the the Business Services object instead of the ITRT object - then the report would only be accessing two objects instead of three.

Your mileage may vary based on your model/data.

I hope that helps,

Jon Strauss

hmmmmm. We don't have a 1:1 relationship between any of those. In particular, a business service is comprised of certain projects and a portion of certain towers. But one tower, like Network, makes its way into nearly all of our services.

Hi Kyle,

I haven't forgotten about this. I've got one of my TBM Advisor colleagues noodling about it.

Cheers,

Deb

Kyle,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. To validate your use case - you are looking to see how much of each project or IT Tower goes in to a business services. In this case you would see a table like the below?

If that is the case let me talk to your CSM about some idea.

Regards,

Craig

The report I'm looking for is more like this (and the reason is because our projects don't go to IT Towers).

Slice by business Unit

Business Unit: ABC Division

Business Service     Project ID     Tower          Cost

APS                         12345                              $1,000

APS                         23456                              $2,500

APS                                             Network       $500

APS                                             Compute     $800

Total APS business service for ABC               $4,800 

Business Unit: XYZ Division

Business Service     Project ID     Tower          Cost

APS                         45678                              $3,000

APS                         98765                              $1,500

APS                                             Network       $1,500

APS                                             Compute     $8,000

Total APS business service for XYZ                $14,000

there is currently no link between projects and towers in our model, other than at the business service level. At the moment, I have 1 report that shows what projects comprise business service APS. I have a separate report that shows what IT resource towers comprise that same business service. The only way to get that information in one report (at least as far as I know) is to export both of these reports into excel and run some pivot tables. not ideal when I have 56 separate business units that I need to report on.

Kyle,

I have been noodling on this a little - would having two table or tables on the same report in Apptio work? Do the BUs have access to Apptio or would you still have to export the data for them?

With no linkage between the objects Apptio can't present the report easily. When you create the table it's basically saying "I don't know the path I would take in the model to capture these things". 

@Mark Nealey do you have any ideas other than two tabs / tables?

I currently have two tables on the same report and it works just fine. My BUs do not have Apptio access so I have to export the data for them. But at the moment, that data is separate--they are basically getting two separate reports; one for the projects and one for the IT towers. The only way I can combine that data is to export the two tables to excel and run a pivot table with some filtering. having to do that 56 times is a painstaking process. I really want to get them into one thing.

Couple of comments...

In Apptio we can only Show Data from 2 objects and filter on a third (or more... but we won't go there right now)

If you're trying to Show Data (Rows/Columns) From 3 objects you can't do that.

It sounds like you want a report that shows

Business Service - IT Resource Tower Name - Project ID

You'd have to have a data relationship between those 3 objects, and it would have to include all of the dollars you want to report on.  The solution Diane mentions below would work as you'd have project information and tower information in 1 object.

I would look into the LookupFromObject functions.  I haven't used them extensively so it's hard for me to say whether it is definitely the solution. 

There are separate functions for LookupFromObjectTotalValue and LookupFromObjectUnitAllocated. There is more information in Apptio help on the syntax of those functions.

Hi Kyle,

You could do a fix by routing your projects through Towers.  It would require you to create a Projects tower in ITRT and send all of your projects dollars there (either directly or by a helper object, depending on what you need to do for your allocation strategies) using the project number as the subtower.  Then, you can send those dollars to the projects object from ITRT.  Additionally, you would need to filter all of your reports that include towers to exclude the Projects tower.  This would break your upgrade path, but might be a workable option.

Best,

Diane

Ug!  Your dilemma is so familiar. We ended up with a solution akin to the one Diane described above.

Our Labor object is backed by time reporting data from Clarity (if you're familiar with that tool) which also contains the cost center of the employee contributing the time. (we don't create unique cost centers for projects, we have cost centers for Labor).

Our Labor data is linked to our IT Resource Towers via Cost Center relationship.  So we simply added a text suffix of "-project" to the Cost Center in our Master Labor dataset.  We also created a duplicate transform of our IT Resource Towers Stage that included the "-project" suffix for each row, and then appended that new stage transform to the IT Resource Towers Master dataset.  The result is that we can link the -project info in Labor with the -project info in the IT Resource Towers data.

Our -project costs then flow out of the IT Resource Towers object into a "Projects" that also contains the -project suffix and then ultimately flow to the Business Services and Business Units.

When we create a report to expose costs, it is possible for us to use only IT Resource Towers and Business Services.

We can easily identify which Tower and Subtower the costs originate from, and we can further differentiate whether the cost is "-project" versus "-blank" (i.e. not project based cost).

This may not fit your scenario exactly, but I can certainly relate to the challenge of trying to work around the 3 object limitation.

Hopefully this will spawn some ideas for you.