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”.
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.
In the Projects Page, requests will display as a total within the “Total Requests” column. Select the linked total to open the projects details view to modify requests.