What-if Analysis

What-if analysis is a tool that helps your organization to decide on a portfolio of investment initiatives that align with your business strategy. This sections details on how to use What-if Analysis for strategic decision making.

What-if Analysis versions

PPM provides two versions of What-if Analysis: enhanced and legacy. This section is based on the enhanced version. For details about the legacy version, see What-if Analysis (legacy version).

The following table lists the differences between the two versions:

Version Details

Enhanced

  • It offers a set of preconfigured layout templates that enable you to analyze your portfolio from different perspectives. It also enables you to create custom templates that align with your organization's specific requirements.
  • It is available at the portfolio level only.
  • To enable the enhanced version, turn on the Enable Portfolio Management What-if Analysis feature toggle. Once the new What-if Analysis is enabled, all the existing scenarios created using the legacy version will no longer be accessible.
Legacy
  • It can be used for both portfolios and programs.
  • The legacy version is enabled by default.

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What-if Analysis overview

What-if Analysis is a simulation tool to plug in different scenarios to explore and compare various investment plans and schedule alternatives based on changing conditions. It is often done when budget and resources are limited and an organization needs most informed decisions.

It helps you predict the answer to the proactive question "what if the situation represented by a certain scenario happens?" Some examples are:

  • What if we delay this project until resources are available?
  • What if we hire more resources to do certain development jobs?
  • What if we put this project on hold and continue it when more budget is approved?
  • What if we approve and execute new proposals?

Simply put, What-if Analysis provides an opportunity to develop project outcomes fitting predetermined characteristics, in order to test how investment plans will perform under varying constraints.

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When to use What-if Analysis

As an IT portfolio manager, when you are going to do annual planning for the next fiscal period (be it year or quarter), you usually weigh how your investment plan can best carry out your organization’s business value within budget and resources.

For example, you might want to

  • Approve all proposed projects.
  • Continue the multi-year in-flight projects.
  • Start must-do projects

However, you cannot do all of them due to budget and resources limit. You can then use What-if Analysis to model different scenarios so as to identify the optimal portfolio of projects.

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Steps to use What-if Analysis

Following are the steps we suggest to use What-if Analysis. You can define your What-if Analysis layout templates to use What-if Analysis differently based on your real situations.

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Next steps: