We use the cost and benefit plans extensively. Most of our users create benefit plans twice during their project - once during project initiation with a high-level estimate of project's tangible benefits, and again at the end of Planning stage when they have an approved benefits estimate. The benefit plans actually contain both positive AND negative values. Positive values indicate tangible benefits returned to the business and negative values indicate ongoing costs incurred as a result of the project.
We use Benefit Class and Benefit Subclass to categorize our rows into things like:
- Incremental revenues (positive benefit)
- Labor cost reduction (positive benefit)
- Technology cost reduction (positive benefit, typically from retiring old systems)
- Cost of product and distribution (negative costs)
- Software license maintenance (negative costs)
- Hosting fees (negative costs)
- Depreciation (negative costs)
We have a report that we can run across all projects which pulls these various line items into groups by benefit class/subclass and by fiscal year. This gives our finance group insight into anticipated benefits and ongoing costs for future years.
The functionality is pretty basic, but it works fairly well for our purposes. Our project managers actually enter their final benefit numbers into Clarity by copying them from a spreadsheet that contains formulas to calculate tax rates, depreciation, etc. That is a limitation of the standard benefit plan - you don't have the ability to do things like that. We also use the spreadsheet template to calculate payback period, internal rate of return, etc. rather than using the numbers that Clarity calculates.