♦ Applies to: IT Planning Foundation with Project Financial Planning (Learn more)

Overview

Project Financial Planning (PFP) is a new application built on top of IT Planning Foundation (ITPF).  PFP requires a separate license and, when enabled, your plans are seamlessly extended to allow the capture, rollup, and analysis of Project costs using the same familiar usage patterns in ITPF. PFP is designed to integrate closely with your department-level budgets built using ITPF so that you allocate and track the costs of using department resources on projects. Also, PFP integrates seamlessly with the new Service Demand Planning.

In this topic, we discuss the basic capabilities of Project Financial Planning.

SEE ALSO

IT Planning Knowledge Base 

Overview: Project Financial Planning - start here

Product Tour

Foundation Changes

We changed IT Planning Foundation to incorporate Projects and Services into a single integrated experience. Those changes affected the user interface (menu/navigation changes) and how changes are controlled and propagated.

SEE ALSO

What's New in IT Planning 2.0 - April 26, 2017 Release.  

Enabling Project Financial Planning

You enable PFP via the Company Profile settings. This will add Project cost objects to your plans, which can be accessed using the new Plan Section menu.  

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Project Portfolios

With PFP, you can define a set of Portfolios to hold all your projects. Portfolios can be further divided into Initiatives and Programs, or however you would like to manage your projects. Project costs are rolled up and summarized according to Portfolio hierarchy. The hierarchy is also used to filter line item views and control access.

Project Budgets

PFP can replace your current spreadsheet or Sharepoint-based project cost estimate collection process. With PFP, project owners forecast and update project costs using the same convenient resource-based budget entry supported by ITPF. And because PFP supports multi-year time horizons, you can forecast costs that project forward over the lifetime of the project (3-5 years). Costs are automatically rolled up and represented in portfolio summary reporting when they are submitted.  

Forecast Labor Costs

Labor costs are usually the biggest cost driver for projects, and the most difficult to handle as part of the budgeting process. PFP supports the convenient entry of internal labor costs using forecasted effort/hours and project labor rates.  

Forecast Infrastructure Costs

Infrastructure and other operational ("run") costs can be forecasted using services and quantities. (The Service Demand Planning module is required to use this capability). Service usage forecast in future years appears as incoming service demand when next year's budget is created (Service Owners see project-based demand in their "baseline" volume forecast). This helps to ensure that project run costs appear in subsequent year planning cycles. 

SEE ALSO

IT Planning: Introducing Service Demand Planning

Understand Project TCO

The project ledger shows the total financial cost (TCO) of the project (or projects). This includes the direct costs from the Expenses page, and the indirect costs resulting from forecasted usage of other services or labor resources. Indirect costs are allocations from one cost object to another (from service to project, or from department to project). This results in a transfer of cost - the project receives a debit, the service (or department) receives a corresponding credit - so that costs are never double counted. Therefore, the ledger shows the true costs - the "P&L" view - of the project.

SEE ALSO

FAQ: IT Planning 2.x (ITPF, PFP and SDP) 

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