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Plan and Manage Investments Using Constraints

To define the boundaries and time lines within which you want to plan and manage your investments, set up targets for your portfolio. Targets allow you to analyze your portfolio objectives and goals by managing your investments in the following ways:

• Setting high-level portfolio targets or constraints and planning, tracking, or measuring portfolio performance against these constraints.
• Creating multiple versions of a plan using a subset of the portfolio data. For example, you can create a plan for the current planning year, and another plan for the following year. Each plan can include different targets for costs, benefits, and resources.
• Comparing and adjusting plan targets and implementing necessary changes to actual investments when plans get approved.

The following types of targets are available for any portfolio:

• Financial. Consider the following factors when determining what financial targets you can use to manage your portfolio:
  • Currency. A portfolio can include investments that are planned in more than one currency. Work with your system administrator to set up a multi-currency system. In a multi-currency system, you can select a target currency for your portfolio. The target currency is based on the currencies that you have enabled in your system. Amounts in various currencies are aggregated and rolled up using the single portfolio currency.
  • Costs. Users can plan for aggregated cost types such as total costs, capital costs, and operating costs. These costs are summarized and aggregated from all investments included in a portfolio. You can set targets for each of these cost types (capital and operating costs) and then view the demand for them coming from the investments. If you track actual costs against investments, you can view aggregated actual costs in the portfolio views.
  • Benefits. Users can plan for aggregate benefits. You can set a total benefit target for the portfolio and then view the aggregated, planned benefits coming from the investments. If you track actual benefits against investments using benefit plans, you can view aggregated actual benefits in the portfolio views.
• Resource. Consider the following factors when determining what resource targets you can use to manage your portfolio:
  • Unit. Think about whether you want to plan the capacity for your portfolio resources using hours or FTE (full-time equivalent) units.
  • Granularity. Consider whether you want to plan based on the total resource capacity or by role-specific capacity. The role-specific capacities are based on existing roles. For example, you can view resource targets by Engineers or Quality Assurance roles.