Showback for Innovation development and support

Question

Does anyone have insights to a good method to allocate innovation work to business units/departments outside IT for showback/chargeback purposes?

In our case the innovation labs support multiple areas but it isn't always as clear as to which BUs are the likely beneficiaries.

A couple thoughts I have are: 1) collecting the tagging through more granular timekeeping metadata or 2) utilizing agile epics/features, etc..

I welcome thoughts from anyone having done this.

-Curtis Cutler
#CostingStandard(CT-Foundation)

Accepted Answer

Hi Curtis,

I think you’re on the right track, as far as understanding the beneficiary of the innovation. So you just need to represent that in your data, like having placeholder or “inactive” values that will connect to projected consumer BU’s; e.g. for something like AppDev, in the app data, add in dev projects with an actual unit = 0 so you can avoid sending most costs to it but still have some data to use for the app as it connects to services and business units (hypothetically speaking, since I'm not familiar with your specific configuration and data availability).
The time tracking data could be useful, provided it sufficiently links upward in the model to innovation work. Agile epics could work by the same token, again depending on how the supporting data would connect into the model.
Hope that helps!

-Taylor Muir
#CostingStandard(CT-Foundation)

IBM Apptio