Overview
Project Costs represent the resources that are required to undertake a project. Costs are flexible to be able to represent whatever the resources are that are being planned against (ie monetary funding, work hours, FTEs, or any other desired resource).
A “Cost” represents the requested amount of resources for a given Project. Projects can draw from one or many different types of Costs if desired. For example, a Project may require both Hardware and Software costs that could be tracked separately. Each Cost type will also have a budget associated with it for a given time period for either year, fiscal year or more granular by month.
Decision Lens Accelerate is designed to assist in portfolio planning over time analyzing the planned cost allocations against planned budgets.
Managing Cost Data
Project Costs can be added from a projects details view or from the Budgets Page. To add costs from the details view, use the ellipses (…) menu next to a projects name and select “Project Details”.
Start by defining the time periods the project will be requesting resources from. Use the date range in the cost table of the details view to do this. A column will be added for each month or year specified from the date range selected.
Projects in an unallocated status (Draft, Idea, Backlog, Archived, On Hold), can have requests added. Projects in an allocated status (Scheduled, In Progress, Completed), can have Requests and Allocations.
If there are multiple Budgets in the portfolio, there will be an option to “Add Cost” so that you can specify which Budgets the project will request from.
Select the Budgets from the Add Costs window and click “Done”. If you have many budgets, use the dropdown arrows in the column headers to filter and search to find a specific Budget quickly.
You will see lines for each Budget you added and can now enter Requests and/or Allocations for the project for all time periods within the Date Range set in this projects cost table.
Total Cost Columns
Decision Lens automatically creates a Total Request, Total Allocated, Total Planned, and Total Obligated columns. These columns can be used to reference the total amount for each respective cost type on the Projects, Score, Budgets or Spend Plan pages. Total Planned and Total Obligated only display for portfolios that have Spend Plan enabled.
Hiding and Showing Total Cost Columns
Use Column Settings to hide or show these columns on the Projects, Score, Budgets or Spend Plan pages. They will automatically be shown on the Projects Page, but hidden on all other pages by default. While these columns can be hidden, they cannot be deleted from a portfolio. These columns will not display on Manage Framework, Request Ideas or within Permissions when assigning fields to users within a portfolio.
Yearly Cost Columns enable you to quickly reference the total cost for a specific cost type and specific year. Portfolio Owners can create and remove Yearly Cost Columns from Column Settings on the Projects, Score, Budgets, and Spend Plan pages.
Select ‘Add Yearly Cost Columns’ to specify the cost types and years you would like to create cost columns for. Cost columns can be created whether using a portfolio formatted in Calendar Years or Fiscal Years.
Select one or more Cost Types and one or more Years. A cost column will be created for every cost type and year selected. For example: Request and Allocated are selected along with years 2025 and 2027. A total of 4 cost columns will be created in this example to reflect requests and allocations for 2025 and 2027. Planned and Obligated cost types only display in portfolios that have Spend Plan enabled.
After selecting ‘Add Columns’ the columns will be added to Column Settings where they can be hidden or shown. These columns will display by default on the Projects Page. Use the eye icon to show them on Score, Budgets, and Spend Plan. Use the ‘X’ within with column tile in Column Settings to delete a Yearly Cost Column. Adding and removing Yearly Cost columns adds and removes for all users within the portfolio. Hiding and showing these cost columns is per user.
Yearly Cost Columns can be reordered by Portfolio Owners on the Projects Page and are included in data exports. Use the column header to adjust the sort order and select the arrow in the column header to filter within the column.