In this article:

The IT Planning 2.0 release introduces new capabilities for IT Planning Foundation (ITPF) as well as two entirely new IT Planning modules: Project Financial Planning (PFP) and Service Demand Planning (SDP).

Project Financial Planning (license required):

This is a new application built on IT Planning Foundation. Use it to holistically manage your run-the-business and grow-the-business budgets, including the ability to forecast and track project cost changes on IT budgets and resources. Specifically:

• Forecast direct and indirect project costs, including labor and IT service usage
• Calculate project cross-charges to departments
• Estimate project labor costs throughout the project lifecycle

More information on PFP can be found in the Project Financial Planning  documentation.

Service Demand Planning (license required):

This is a new application built on IT Planning Foundation. Use it to create and manage demand-driven IT service budgets, and drive economic accountability through P&L ownership. Specifically:

• Create service-based budgets with direct and indirect costs
• Forecast demand for services
• Determine service unit prices
• Forecast department chargebacks and cost recoveries

More information on SDP can be found in the Service Demand Planning  documentation.

For a schedule of key dates, refer to Coming Soon: IT Planning 2.0! 

Introducing Departments, Projects and Services

IT Planning currently supports planning at a GL Cost Center / Account level. To enable planning at higher levels such as planning for Services and Projects and to better align with how companies typically organize and manage their financial planning, we are uplifting IT Planning to plan in terms of Cost Objects. A Cost Object is a plan entity to which costs can be assigned.

In IT Planning 2.0 there are three Cost Objects: Departments, Projects and Services. These roll-up into a single-consolidated IT plan and can be mapped to GL Cost Centers to get a Cost Center / Account view.

IT Planning 2.0 Navigation

To accommodate the new capabilities, we’ve added and re-ordered navigation menu options.

Plan Section menu – This menu lists the available plan sections: All Plan Sections, Departments, Projects, Services. This menu is available if you have Project Financial Planning or Service Demand Planning enabled. Customers who have only licensed IT Planning Foundation will automatically see the Departments plan section.  

Plan Sub-section menu – This menu lists all the elements in the Cost Object for the selected Plan Section. The Cost Object elements are shown in the hierarchy specified for the selected Cost Object.

View menu – This menu lists all views available for the cost object:

• Summary: Review summary plan information by Cost Object
• Expenses: Previously called “Line Items”. Capture direct expenses such as labor, contracts, assets and other expenses
• Labor (Projects): Capture labor demand in hours
• Services (Projects): Capture service unit demand by Project
• Incoming Demand (Services): Capture incoming Service demand by Business Units, Services and Projects
• Component Demand (Services): Capture component demand for Services
• Service Pricing (Services): Review unit price and calculate the effective unit cost
• Ledger: Review all direct and indirect expenses plus revenue (cross-charges). The Ledger view is only available if Project Financial Planning or Service Demand Planning is enabled.
• Targets (Departments): Review and edit opex, capex and labor target information
• Status: Review plan status

Expenses view

The Expenses view (previously Line Items) is set up with four worksheets to capture labor headcount, contracts, assets and all other expenses. There is now a read-only Summary tab that shows the financial output of the Labor, Contracts, Assets and Other tabs. All plan inputs are entered using the Labor, Contracts, Assets or Other tab.

Control the time range displayed in plans

IT Planning 2.0 includes a new and improved way to control what time range you want to see in the tabular and summary views – we’ve added a Plan Time Range Selector that lets you control the time range with a simple click. The Plan Time Range Selector is accessible from all views and persists as you change views.

This improvement means that we’ve made some changes on how Show/Hide works with the month/quarter/fiscal year columns:

• Months continues to show/hide all months in all years of the Plan
• Quarters continues to show/hide all quarters in all years of the Plan
• FY16, FY17, FY18, etc. have been replaced with:
  • A Plan Time Range Selector at the top of the page that determines the time range displayed in the columns
  • A FY Total dimension that will show/hide all annual totals in the Plan

Simplified Submission

With the current submission model, submitted plans are only visible to the immediate parent and approved versions are not visible until an entire group is submitted. In addition, changes must be explicitly approved up each level of the Cost Center hierarchy before it’s visible at the All Cost Centers level. This made it difficult for Budget Process Owners to understand and manage the changes.

To simplify the system and provide more flexibility to the approval workflow, we made the following changes:

• Submitted plans are immediately visible at the All Plan Sections level
• Group Cost Center Owners no longer need to approve, submit or reject group plans
• The approval workflow (illustrated below) are separated from the Cost Center hierarchy structure so you can configure a workflow that’s independent from the budget roll-up

Enhanced Permissions

User permissions will be managed in a new Reference Data table called Cost Object Permissions. One of the key changes we made to user permissions is that changes will be updated immediately across all plans regardless of plan state. Reference Data no longer has to be updated for permissions to be updated.

The Cost Object Permissions table has tabs for you to enter user permissions for Departments, Projects or Services. You can assign a user an Edit Level and an Approval Level. Edit Level options are: Edit & Submit or View Only. With the new submission model, each Department, Project or Service can have up to five approvers. When a plan is submitted the 1st Approver is notified. Once the 1st Approver approves the plan the 2nd Approver is notified, and so on. Approvers can approve or reject a plan at any time. Multiple users can be assigned to the same Approval Level, however only one user needs to approve the plan. If a higher-level approver approves a plan the lower levels are auto-approved. The Budget Process Owner is the final approver and can finalize the plan to auto-approve all submitted plans.

Enhanced Status Tracking

The Status page now shows all plans in a single view. You can use the Plan Sub-section menu to filter the list of plans. Use the Status page to review plan status (Not Started, In Progress, Submitted, Approved/Returned), when the last action occurred and who approved or rejected a plan.

Value-Added Tax for Contracts

With the new value-added tax (VAT) support for contracts, you can:

• Manage VAT Rates by Location to be used in plans
• Have budget owners enter contract line items without VAT and IT Planning will calculate the uplift with VAT

VAT for contracts can be enabled from the Company Profile.

Review spend and variance

Over the last year, we’ve made enhancements to the Planning Summary page so you can visualize year to date performance relative to plan right from the same page. (How?) For these reasons, we have removed the Spend Management Summary page and will continue to add enhancements to the Planning Summary page analytics in future releases.