Investments › Investment Overview

Investment Overview

Investments—projects, programs, applications, assets, products, ideas, services, and other work—make up a portfolio inventory. Collectively, they are the investments under analysis. Only when you have identified, cataloged, and described your complete domain of investments, can you effectively manage investment portfolios.

You can quickly create and maintain your investment inventory with the minimum information required for portfolio management. Each investment you add becomes part of a collective set and is managed with that set separately from the other investment types.

You can also create and manage portfolios, including how to add other investments, including projects, services, and ideas to your portfolio. Using portfolio management, you can distribute up, roll down, rank, and time vary your investments as a collection under analysis.

The following are the components associated with investment management:

• Properties. Use the Properties menu to define the investment, from its name and schedule to baselines that capture snapshots at various stages in the investment lifecycle. In addition, you can define budget information and enable the investment for financial transactions.
• Team. Use the Team menu to build a team for the investment. A team consists of staff which performs the work and participants who assist the staff by providing information, suggestions, and concerns. But the participants do not perform any work directly related to the investment.
• Financial Plans. A financial plan is a tool that helps managers estimate and predict future cost requirements. Financial planning tools allow managers to model in detail where cost or revenues for a specific period occur. The tools also enable them to create the budget most suitable for their business needs.

  Finance managers set up defaults that define how financial plans can be created and the financial time periods used. The investment managers create multiple financial cost plans as estimates for a budget. They can submit the most appropriate cost plan for approval as a budget. Finance managers approve the submitted cost plans.

  The investment financial planning pages shows bottom up aggregation of the plan and the line item plan details from child investments.

  See the Financial Management User Guide for more information.

• Chargebacks. Chargebacks are the inter-account transfer of costs to departments that receive investments. Chargebacks debit (or charge) these departments for their shared cost of investments during a specified period. A corresponding credit is issued to departments who provided the investment—giving these departments financial credit for the work they completed.

  Managers set up the defaults that determine how chargebacks are processed. They also set up the debit rules that determine who gets charged and how much.

  See the Financial Management User Guide for more information.

  Department managers who are charged for the cost of investments can review and approve these charges using an invoice. Department managers who provide the investment can monitor incurred costs and credits received using recovery statements.

  See the CA Clarity Basics User Guide for more information.

• Hierarchies. Use the Hierarchy tab to view and manage parent and child relationships with other investments. With a hierarchy, you can view the financial rollup and effort rollup.

  You can also convert an idea into an investment using Demand Management.

  See the Demand Management User Guide for more information.

• Processes. Use Processes to view initiated processes or create them. For example, you can create a process that notifies the managers when the status of an investment changes to "Approved." You can also define a process to do actions, such as changing the progress to "Completed."

  Your CA Clarity PPM administrator can define service type-specific processes—or global processes designed to work on a specific service—from the Administration Tool. Use the Processes: Initiated page to create and run processes on services.

  See the Administration Guide for more information.

• Audit. Audit trail keeps a historical record of all changes, additions, and deletions that occurs to specified investment fields. Use the Audit menu to view a log of change, addition, or deletion records for any of the fields chosen for auditing.

  The Audit menu appears only if it is set up your CA Clarity PPM administrator and if you have the appropriate access rights. The CA Clarity PPM administrator also determines the fields audited and what information is stored in the audit trail.

  See the CA Clarity Basics User Guide for more information.

More information:

Portfolios