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PPM Insights: Surviving-to-Thriving, Taking the Mystery out of Financial Planning – Part 6 (Actual Cost)

By dobka03 posted Apr 28, 2017 08:20 AM

  

Hi PPM practitioners! Welcome back to the last blog in this Financial Planning series (for now, but who am I kidding); hope they have been helpful.

Why Track Investment Spend?

Key business drivers for tracking actual cost against investments are generally in the family of cost control. Every wise PM wants to ensure that delivered outcomes provide value to the organization. Part of delivering that value includes ensuring that the cost of actual work performed is in line with authorized spend (cost and budget plans). Insight into whether actual cost constitutes variance to plan is a critical early warning/risk indicator for leadership and project teams, and is especially important while there’s still time to make course corrections.

Financial Review Report

 

Regardless of delivery mindset (agile, waterfall, hybrid), the consequences of unmanaged cost overruns can force undesirable scope reductions (leading to outcomes that fail to delight the organization) and/or slower time to market (resulting in lower profitability). Early insight into poorly performing investments also enables executives to make better decisions about when to reinvest in a more optimal portfolio.

Portfolio Review

 

Actual Cost Entry Methods

CA PPM supports several methods for capturing actual cost:

  • Timesheets: Actual cost of labor resources automatically derived from posted CA PPM timesheets based on the cost/rate matrix.
  • Transaction Entry: Manually entered transactions for non-timesheet labor and other non-labor expenses by investment/ resource/transaction date/quantity based on the cost/rate matrix or supplied rate.
  • Imported Transactions: Labor and/or non-labor transactions imported from an external source (e.g., Oracle, SAP) leveraging the CA PPM Financial Transactions Adaptor Packaged Work Product (PWP). Check out more info on CA PPM PWPs and this blog by CA architect Janet Ulrich.

 

Dashboards and Reports

CA PPM provides value-added dashboards and reports to track transaction-, investment- and portfolio-level costs based on the needs of PMs, Finance, and other leadership (beauty of CA PPM's end-to-end ideation to deployment integration).

Investment Actual Cost

Investment Cost by Period

 

There's much more, but hopefully you have seen the simplicity of getting started with CA PPM Financial Planning. Go for it.

 

In Case You Missed It

Taking the Mystery out of Financial Planning – Part 1 (The Basics)

Taking the Mystery out of Financial Planning – Part 2 (Financial Framework)

Taking the Mystery out of Financial Planning – Part 3 (Classifications)

Taking the Mystery out of Financial Planning – Part 4 (Managing Rates)

Taking the Mystery out of Financial Planning – Part 5 (Cost and Budget Plans)

 

Readers interested in more detail around CA PPM Financial Planning can check out DocOps. I encourage you to participate in the best-in-class CA Communities site, where you have access to your peers, events and support. You can also reach out to CA Services for information about CA PPM and individualized business outcome references and analysis. Feel free to post in the comments section of this blog or contact me directly via email and Twitter @kdobsonppm.

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