Hi all,

I'm in the Cost Transparency 2 class and the instructor referenced at least one Apptio customer who has elected to use derived projects to support their specific business case. I understand all the mechanics of setting one up, but am curious as to what specific business cases customers have that creating one or more derived projects is the solution for...

Thanks!

Mary G

Hi Mary,

I have created many derived projects for customers for multiple reasons. A derived project means that all configuration changes that happen in dev carry over into this new derived project whereas a snapshot this would not be the case. Some reasons include:

1. Testing a new data input  that is critical to the model before implementing it into Dev. E.G new financial data, new labor data. This is important to test before implementing as it can;take a long time and customers still want all other work to carry on in their dev project and it could effect data quality and allocations. The work that they then do in dev carries over into their derived project so they can see the effects it will have on the new data while not interfering with simultaneous work streams.

2. Changing the model in some way and wanting to test the changes over time. This would also require a derived project because to test a change over time you will need all the data from new time periods to effect this project. Instead of uploading data twice (once into stage and pushing down to dev and loading into the snapshot) you can just load it once into stage, push it to dev and the changes would be seen in the derived project.

Please note however snapshots may work just as well for these use cases as long as you do not want work that is going on in your dev environment to effect it.

I hope this helps,

Lauren Griessel

Thanks Lauren,

I knew snapshots and derived projects would both be useful for testing changes - but hadn't thought about the distinction of using derived instead of snapshot when that testing takes place over a longer period of time (and when you want the changes in your dev environment to ripple into your derived so you can test against those changes as well).

I guess I'll slightly re-word my question...

Are there use cases that would use a derived project (ongoing) that aren't related to 'testing'?

If you've done a lot of development in a project (in DEV/STG) but you want PRD end users to see a different project name, then you can derive a project and then make the original project invisible on PRD. In other words, PRD end users will only see (and be able to open) the newly derived / newly renamed project.

Mary,

We use a derived project of Cost Transparency to apply redaction (what users can see).  By leaving Cost Transparency alone and user with access to that project can see all the data without restriction.  In our derived project, only if you have been given access to a particular business can you see their data.

Have a great day,

Jeff

Ooooh, that was a timely and excellent response since I'm also doing some looking into redaction for various business reasons on some new data we're adding in. Cool, thanx.

Hi,

I have a few clients in the delivery side that have needed to create derived projects.  A couple examples of that was one that we do not do very often, but I had a client that needed to be able to compare budget \ forecast versions to another version.  I created a derived project to pull all of the configuration and data into the my derived project.  I created a cross project metric so I it would pull in version 1 from Cost Transparency for the reporting surface.  The reason I leveraged the cross project metric was so they could just come into this derived project and load which version of the budget \ forecast that they needed to view.  Once they loaded it would flow through the model and on the reporting surface I had configured reports at each layer (Cost Source, Towers, Services, BUs) that would tell them the difference between version to version.  The other cool thing was the fact that they still have the ability to trace the model to see other differences. 

Thanks,

Ryan 

I use them for What if calculations: basically i derive a project, then manually edit out certain data points in order to see the full impact. In my care i did for mobile telecom to see what he numbers would be if i applied certain updated contract terms to our invoices for 2 specific providers. It's not a perfect solution but it helped me create a comparison that helped during our budget planning sessions. I don't know if many folks think about just editing the source data like that I'm not much of a conventional wisdom type..lol