Managing Your Portfolios › Explore Alternate Portfolio Plans

Explore Alternate Portfolio Plans

A plan is a subset of your portfolio data that allows you to explore the alternatives for your portfolio investments using a "what if" environment.

As a portfolio manager, you want to evaluate portfolios and plans and understand how the portfolios are executing against the plans. With the larger content defined in a portfolio, you can create specific plans within the portfolio horizon. You can use these plans to work with subsets of the portfolio content in a focused manner.

To explore different options, you can create versions of a plan by changing the parameters of the original plan. You can then view comparison reports to compare the different versions or scenarios for the existing work. Ultimately, you can approve a plan as the Plan of Record or the plan that you want to use and implement.

Example: Portfolio Planning Process

The Office of CIO at Forward Inc. regularly reviews their current plans within the overall IT portfolio. As part of typical business cycles, they explore alternate scenarios for how they can use the IT budget and resources to accomplish their portfolio objectives. Depending on the nature and size of the recommended changes, the CIO staff adopts the following approach during the plan reviews:

• For small and focused changes, they consider implementing those changes immediately, provided the changes support existing goals and only small changes to operational plans. For example, pushing out an investment start date by two months, or placing an investment on hold due to current project overruns and resource constraints.
• For more extensive changes that require extra review, they capture these changes in named versions of plans or scenarios. They circulate these scenarios to the stakeholders and collect feedback in a more formal and disciplined review process. For example, an annual planning process can involve two formal review cycles. The first review is with the IT leadership team. The second review is with the Executive Steering Committee made up of senior leaders from major divisions of the company.

The following diagram describes how the portfolio manager and stakeholders explore alternate plans for the portfolio investments:

To explore the alternate portfolio plans, perform these steps:

1. Verify the Prerequisites.
2. Create a Plan within a Portfolio.
3. Generate Versions of the Plan or Scenarios.
4. Compare the Plans or Scenarios.
5. Designate the Plan of Record.