Clarity

We need to be able lock down one cost plan so that no one except the administrators can change it. Our project managers have been granted the "Cost Plan - Edit All" right because we typically do want them to manage their own plans. However, in certain instances we need one special cost plan that they can't change. It didn't look like I could manage this through security, so I thought that maybe I would use a process to lock the attributes of the cost plan and then just give administrators the ability to run that process against the cost plan in question. However it appears that I am unable to use a cost plan as a primary object on a process. Does anyone have any ideas on how we could achieve this? We are On Demand customers, running 12.0.6.

Hi All,

Any ideas here for Amy?

Thanks!
Chris

Amy,

You can move that cost plan to budget plan and approve it and then make it as current under budget plan and when the "real" budget plan comes you can then make that as current under budget plan.you can provide an meaningful name so that it can distinguish from the other plan in budget.Hope you have not provided budget plan edit all to them.Meanwhile what is that special cost plan?.Is it the approved funding of the project or what?.

cheers,
sundar

Hi Sundar,

I hope all is well. I have some questions around multiple cost plans.

The Senior Director had questions in regards to what should the cost plan names be and why would they create additional cost plans. We had a meeting and I told her multiple cost plans could be used for what if scenarios but there only could be one plan of record. She came up with more of a stage gate cost plans, for instance

Forecast Cost Plan
Scope and Estimating
Approved

So the question came up as to can an executive be able to see what the cost plan would be at each of the above levels without having to drill down or could they had a time scale to the overview of the cost plan like in the screenshot below, I told her this would have to be custom report and the scenario planning you should be at the portfolio level, the executive should not have to drill down at the project level and the project manager should be responsible for knowing what is the proper plan of record. How does your organization set up multiple cost plans? Do you only start with one and make editions?

We had considered the budget plans as an option but were looking at some different alternatives to try to avoid the limitations inherent with those, such as not being able to delete them or change them if they are approved, etc.

In our process when a project starts only the funding needed for the Planning Stage is approved at that point. When the project passes the Executing stage gate, then we approve the rest of the project budget. There are some special exceptions where our portfolio managers want to "earmark" a project's entire budget right up front because the project is very important. So while the project manager is still only authorized to spend the Planning Stage amount during Planning, the portfolio management committee wants to see the ENTIRE project budget as "approved" so that those funds are not available to be snapped up by other projects. We wanted to use the locked cost plan to store that "earmarked" amount and continue using the budget plans to store the real "approved" amount that the project managers have been authorized to use.

Does anyone know why cost plans aren't available as main objects in processes?

We use a gel script attached to a process to grant PM's access to only their own Cost Plans (Instance) rather than grant Global Rights. Admins have Global rights. Taking this approach would allow admin to have access and PM's would not.

pete.gallagher wrote:

We use a gel script attached to a process to grant PM's access to only their own Cost Plans (Instance) rather than grant Global Rights. Admins have Global rights. Taking this approach would allow admin to have access and PM's would not.

How did you accomplish this? When we look at assigning the "Project-Cost Plans-Edit" right at an instance level, you can only grant the access at the PROJECT level, not at the individual cost plan level. What we are trying to do is say "out of all the cost plans on this particular project you can edit all of them except this one". What the system security right appears to do either say "you can manage ALL the cost plans on this project" OR "you can manage NONE of the cost plans on this project".

Tammy,

i will explain how we are capturing Approved Cost in Financial Plan.

In clarity Financial Planning it only have the cost plan and budget plan.we wanted to capture approved cost too.so we created one more called approved plan (That is also under budget plan) to suit Internal financial process.

we have

1.Forecast
2.Approved funds
3.Budget

To accommodate 3 plans we have created an custom lookup attribute called plan type where the user will choose between three.we are using this attribute to differentiate the plans.

Forecast is captured in under Project: Financial Plans: Cost Plans where PM needs to update monthly after reviewing the actuals. PM's had been provided the Cost Plan Edit All rights.The POR will be shown in all OOB and our custom reports.

Approved Funds Cost is also captured in Project: Financial Plans: Budget Plans with plan type (custom attribute) as "Approved". Approved Cost are keyed into the system as Approved Plans by the PMO team while creating the project itself.PM will have only the View Rights.Approved Funds is chosen as "Current" .

Budget is captured in under Project: Financial Plans : Budget Plans.While budgets are provided by Finance and uploaded to the system as Budget Plans by batches by our Tech support team after the annual budget exercise.PM will have only the View Rights.we will take the latest plan with the help of
Latest updated and revision.

Both Budget and Approved Plans can be viewed via the Project: Financial Plans: Budget Plans page and with the help of custom attribute plan type we
differentiate the budget and Approved Funds.

In all OOB portlets we can view the Forecast Cost and Approved Funds that is under Budgeted Cost and to view the other plan type we have developed custom financial reports where we can view all the 3 plan type and check the cost,variance etc.

we know this is an customization but we have crossed 2 major upgrades and ok.When CA officially comes with Approved Cost plan option we can move to it.

Cheers,
sundar

This is great Sundar, thank you so much. Can you share your portlet? Also Senior Management had a meeting and they want to be able to baseline the planned cost. The want to capture the original budget to what is being forecasted if that makes any sense. I have the requirements and would like to share them with you to make sure we are not off base.

I put in an ERQ a few years ago to reinstate the idea of an 'approved' cost plan (basically an official Forecast). The capability was removed with 8.0. I believe CA is still slogging through their 'next gen' financials.

I strongly recommend you put in an ERQ on the item to give some visibility to product management. The current capability could really stand to be augmented to differentiate between the official budget and official forecast.

Steve