Scenario planning in Portfolio Planning
Summarize
Summary of Scenario planning in Portfolio Planning
Scenario planning in Portfolio Planning allows organizations to create, evaluate, and approve strategic scenarios that align with their business goals and priorities. This feature provides a safe environment to test different planning approaches without impacting the live plan, helping anticipate challenges and make informed decisions before implementation.
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Key Features
- Scenario Definition: A scenario is a simulated plan version where you can prioritize items, adjust timelines, and assess potential impacts without changing the live plan.
- In Plan Toggle: This toggle lets you include or exclude planning items within a scenario. By default, it is enabled for items prioritized or completed and with start/end dates within the portfolio plan.
- Date Fields: Start and End dates in a scenario auto-populate based on planned or actual dates but can be adjusted. Approved scenarios update these dates as official planning dates, with out-of-range dates highlighted for review.
- Scenario Comparison: Multiple scenarios can be compared side by side to evaluate alignment with strategic goals, trade-offs, and financial impacts, facilitating selection of the optimal plan.
- Budget Setting and Evaluation: You can set target portfolio budgets for fiscal periods or timelines and compare these against proposed budgets and monetary benefits from prioritized items.
- Workflow Roles: The scenario planning process involves an execution owner who creates scenarios and a portfolio owner who reviews and approves the best scenario.
Key Outcomes
- Enables exploration of multiple strategic approaches safely before live execution.
- Supports better decision-making through comparative analysis of scenario impacts and goal alignment.
- Helps anticipate challenges and adjust plans proactively to optimize business outcomes.
- Facilitates budget management by comparing target vs proposed investments aligned to prioritized work.
- Streamlines approval of strategic plans that best meet organizational priorities and timelines.
Create and evaluate strategic scenarios to explore different planning approaches. Approve the optimal scenario that aligns with the organizational goals and strategic priorities.
Scenario planning overview
Scenario planning in Portfolio Planning enables organizations to create, evaluate, and approve the best strategic scenario that aligns with their strategic goals and intended business outcomes. This process helps in visualizing different approaches, assessing their impacts, and making informed decisions before implementing the live plan. By using scenario planning, organizations can anticipate potential challenges.
What is a scenario
A scenario in Portfolio Planning is a simulated version of a plan that enables you to explore a strategic approach without affecting the live plan. It provides a safe environment to prioritize items, adjust timelines, and evaluate the potential impacts of each approach.
As compared to a plan, a scenario additionally has the following:
- In Plan toggle: The In Plan toggle enables you to prioritize or de-prioritize the planning items in the scenario you’re creating. By default, when you create a scenario, the
In Plan toggle is turned on for planning items that have all of the following field values:
- Planning state as Prioritized or Done
- Start and end dates within the portfolio plan dates.
- Date fields: The Start date and End date fields for the scenario are automatically populated based on either the planned or actual start and end dates of the planning items. You can update these dates during the scenario planning process. Once the scenario is approved, the updated dates are recorded as the approved dates for the planning items. If the updated dates fall outside the acceptable range, they’re highlighted in yellow.
For more information on portfolio plans, see Portfolio plans in Portfolio Planning.
By comparing scenarios side by side, you can assess the differences in goal alignment and trade-offs between each scenario. This comparative analysis helps identify the scenario that best meets strategic objectives. For more information on comparing the scenarios, see Compare scenarios in Portfolio Planning.
Scenario planning workflow in Portfolio Planning
Using the Scenario Planning feature in Portfolio Planning, you can perform the following activities:
- Create a scenario to explore different strategic approaches and business outcomes. For more information, see Create a scenario in Portfolio Planning.
- Adjust and compare multiple scenarios side by side to evaluate differences in goal alignment, trade-offs, and financial benefits. For more information, see Compare scenarios in Portfolio Planning.
- Approve the best scenario that aligns with the organizational goals. For more information, see Approve a scenario in Portfolio Planning.
- Set a target portfolio budget for each of your planning cycle, which can be for fiscal period, quarter, yearly, or portfolio timeline.
- Evaluate the target vs proposed budget of In-plan items and review the monetary benefit from the prioritized items.
Scenario Planning workflow overview
The scenario planning workflow involves an execution owner and a portfolio owner. The following illustration illustrates how scenario plans are created based on the planned or actual dates of planning items and how the In-plan toggle is adjusted based on the states of these planning items.
For more detailed guidance on using scenario planning to enhance your Portfolio Planning process, see Optimizing planning with scenario planning in Portfolio Planning.