Apptio Community,

We brought this question to our CSM recently and got some great options but  I would like to hear from the community on how you do it and what pros and cons you have seen. We are being asked by our end users of total project costs. Not all project costs flow through the Projects Model object today in our model. We have project cost flowing through Vendor Object (for Vendor PO's hitting the GL), through our IT Service Agreement Custom Model object for our Managed Service Partner working on project that final flow through ITRT and then branch above to Project App Dev and Project App Support Custom Objects or Vendor Project App Custom Object or Unallocated Project App Spend finally to Applications. Are your end users asking for Project Total Cost? How are you answering the use case today?

Please share your experiences so collectively we can learn best practices and different ways of achieving the same objective.

@Debbie Hagen @Taryn Kane @Pablo Santana @Babu Hussainsab Mehrunnesa @Melanie Ercoli @Ericka Norman @Raquel Garcia

Hi Srikanth,

we see this quite a lot. It all comes down to how you wish to have the various reports represented, and so there are many approaches.

One approach that we have implemented in a number of customers is to allocate Vendor Project costs from Vendors to the Projects model, and ensure these costs do not allocate from Vendors to ITRT.

By doing this the Project and Vendor reports will both show the complete story, and you will most likely get a more accurate of App TCO.

Hop this helps

Michael

Hi Michael, Thanks for your review and inputs. We were also looking at creating a new Project Object above ITRT and getting the cost in there for Total Project Cost Reporting, however based on our CSM and your inputs we will most likely be looking to route project cost from Vendor to Projects and flowing all Project costs up to ITRT through the Project cost object and not up through Vendor (to avoid double counting). 

@Michael Moulsdale @Babu Hussainsab Mehrunnesa

Sounds good. By routing Project costs through ITRT you are also making the model more performant which always a good thing.

When I have done that with other customers I have sometimes created a custom Tower called Projects, with the sub tower being the Application Name. The reason we had done this is that the customer did not want to see project costs as part of their benchmarked tower spend as they felt that should be limited to BAU. However, it would be just as appropriate to flag them as Application - Application Development. Again this really depends on your use case, and how you wish to see costs reported.