In this release:

What's New and Product Help

We've added a "What's New" notification right in IT Planning to help keep you up-to-date on the latest releases. When new features are added, all users will see a notification when they sign in to IT Planning.

You can also click the Help command to see the last three What's New notifications, Product Help, or to open the IT Planning Knowledge Base (KB) on Apptio Community.

Unsubmitted Changes

We've renamed the View Latest Version feature (Learn more) to View Unsubmitted Changes to make it explicit that the version(s) you're viewing are in-progress versions of the plan.

Delegated Costs

Requires Project Financial Planning (Learn more).

Do you struggle with project run costs, like ensuring that project hardware or software maintenance costs are properly recorded in next year's Department budgets?  Do you wish you had a better way to capture the true multi-year costs of a project, inclusive of which Departments pay those costs?  Well, then the Delegated Costs feature is for you (Learn more).

Delegated costs are a way to record costs that originate in a project but end up in a Department (or Service) budget. Essentially, you can specify an expense that starts off paid for by the project, but then switches to a Department or Service budget at some future point in time.  For example, a software license purchase that comes with a 3-year maintenance contract: the project might pay for the licenses and first year of support, but the Department pays for subsequent years of support.  Another example is hardware server refresh project: the project might pay for the hardware purchases (capital) but the depreciation expense is assigned to some other Department.  

Delegated costs give you the flexibility to record expenses in the project but specify which Departments will pay the future costs and when.  Any project expense line item (Labor, Contracts, Assets, Other financials) can be delegated in this way.

With assets, you can delegate the purchase amount (capital expense) and depreciation expense separately.  This gives you the ability to capture the full multi-year costs of a capital project but still record the expenses against the responsible Departments.

Delegated costs show up in the responsible Department budgets in the correct periods, along with the originating project information.  Say goodbye to project run cost surprises!