Create a what-if scenario

A what-if analysis scenario is a simulated situation that you use for experiment. In a what-if scenario, you can see what would happen if you invest a defined budget and resources on different portfolios of contents. This section describes how to create a what-if scenario for a portfolio.

Identify investment initiatives

Before using what-if analysis for your strategic planning, you should identify your investment initiatives and include them in a portfolio, including:

  1. Identify and collect all your investment initiatives, including in-flight projects, proposed projects, and completed projects for maintenance.
  2. Create projects for in-flight projects, proposals for proposed projects, and assets for maintenance projects in PPM.
  3. Create staffing profiles for these entities to track the resource demand, and create financial summaries to track the forecast cost.
  4. Create a portfolio to group the investment initiatives.

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Create a what-if scenario

This section describes how to create a what-if scenario for a portfolio.

Prerequisites:

To create a what-if scenario for a portfolio:

  1. From the PPM menu, click Open > Portfolio Management.
  2. In the upper-right corner, click the What-if Analysis button .
  3. In the What-if Analysis page, click Add.

  4. In the Add Scenario window, complete the following fields:

    Field Details
    Name Provide a unique name for the scenario.
    Scenario Create for

    From the drop-down list, select the target portfolio for which you want to do what-if analysis.

  5. Click Done.

    What-if Analysis fetches data from the portfolio. Whenever the portfolio is updated, the data is automatically synced to the scenario.

    Data in scenario Details
    Contents

    The entities that meet the following requirements are automatically included in the scenario:

    • Have both start and end dates specified
    • The time periods fall in the scenario's time range. For details about scenario time range, see Select scenario time range.

    Available in 23.4 and later: You can also manually add other entities you want into the scenario. For details, see Add contents to a scenario.

    Demanded budget

    Calculated from the financial summary of each of the contents in the selected portfolio.

    Note: When calculating the costs of programs within a scenario, only the costs associated with the items under the program are included, the cost of the program itself is not included.

    Demanded resources Calculated from the staffing profile of each of the contents in the selected portfolio.

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Select scenario time range

When you create a new scenario, it reflects the data and projections for the current year. You can select a different time range for the scenario.

To select a time range for a scenario:

  1. Open the scenario details page.

  2. At the top right of the page, locate the Calendar button .

  3. Click the Calendar button, and select a start period and end period for the scenario.

    The scenario details page is automatically updated to display the data and projections for the selected time period.

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Switch scenario layout templates

You can use various layout templates for a scenario to perform what-if analysis from different perspectives.

To use a different layout template for scenario:

  1. Open the scenario details page. In the top-right corner of the page, you can find the layout template currently used by the scenario.

  2. Click the down arrow and select a different layout template.

    The changes made to a what-if scenario are retained when switching to another layout template.

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See also: