Investment Processes by Stage
Here we set out stages of a typical Project lifecycle and describe how Investment Management features fit into these. Your own stages and related process details may be different, but this high-level explanation will illustrate how the features in the system work together.
If you use resource management with costed resources (whereby resource rates are used to calculate resource cost), then Resource Management will impact cost at every stage as cost calculated from Resource Demand will flow into Investment forecast, and actual hours will result in actual cost.
Concept Stage
Having received and validated a Project request, it is promoted to the Concept stage in order to develop the full business case for the potential Project, before deciding if and when to deliver it.
This includes:
- Creating a cost forecast for the Project, with resource demand feeding cost into the forecast.
- Prioritising the Project and modelling scenarios in combination with other Project requests to decide if and when to start the Project.
- Once the decision is made to go ahead, moving the start date of the Project to a time when resources and investment are available to commence delivery (with resource and investment forecasts rescheduled accordingly – see The Project 'Time Window').
Initiation Stage
At this stage, we are getting ready to commence Project delivery.
This includes:
- Allocating budget to the Project, to support the investment forecast (see Investment, Programme).
- Submitting resource requests (see Resource Demand, Resource Request) and approving them (see Resource Approval) to commit specific team members to the Project. Project cost may change if an assigned team member has a different resource rate to the one previously forecast.
Execution Stage
During Project delivery, investment-related activities may include:
- Recording of actuals by entering them directly within the investment grid of the Project for certain types of cost.
- Entering timesheets to supply actual hours as well as actual cost for resource-related cost types.
- Importing cost transactions from the financial accounting system (such as vendor invoices) to supply further costs for the Project (see Cost Transaction Import).
- Throughout Execution, resource capacity will be monitored against demand, as well as actual cost against forecast and budget.
Budgets
Projects (and Programmes themselves) create cost forecasts, on which basis appropriate budgets are allocated to them. All budgets are broken down by budget categories (see Parameter Set-Up).
Portfolio Budgets
At the highest level, budgets are defined at Portfolio level (see Investment, Portfolio).
Programme Budgets
Programmes hold their own budgets (see Investment, Programme).
The total of all Programme budgets will be reconciled with their Portfolio to ensure that the Portfolio budget is not exceeded.
Programmes allocate budgets to Projects as well as holding back some budget to spend at Programme level (see Investment, Programme).