Hi Folks,
Budgeting Best Practices within Workfront is an interesting topic, but one I've not read much about within community.my.workfront.com, so I decided to post the advice I just gave a new client (below).
In their case, they've set up Portfolios, each with a Budget on them (under the Portfolio Optimizer) against which Projects (organized into Programs) should "draw" throughout the year. Each Portfolio also has a custom data field on it called Budget Year, which is currently set to 2019 (this year) on every Portfolio. There are also a few other nuances we've sorted out (namely, "sub-portfolios", "project level budget additions", and "actual expenses draw downs"); but otherwise, a pretty standard usecase.
That said, the one place (time, really) budgeting could be a problem will be when rolling over to a new year. In many industries, there's a pinch-point where the current budget is still being managed (e.g. Nov/Dec), but the budget for the new year also needs to be set up. Although we've helped many of our clients go to great lengths to allow such coexistence, the most practical approach (which I'd suggest, at least until the former is warranted) is to:
- plan the new budget separately (either outside Workfront in a spreadsheet, or within Workfront as a special Budget Planning project), and then (when the time is right)
- bulk update all the portfolio's Budget Year all at once to "cut over"
- enter the new budget amounts
- close the old projects (and/or move them "out" of the portfolios to an archived portfolio)
- adjust the project level budgets (if used) on in-flight projects that will remain in the portfolio
- add new projects as needed
- if there is a new portfolio, add at least one project beneath it (a simple convention) to ensure that a project level report will capture all portfolios and their budgets
With this relatively simple approach, you can then leverage a wealth of native features within Workfront to help monitor and manage your budgets.
If you have some experience (or questions about) using Budgets within Workfront, I invite you to share them on this thread for further discussion, and as a resource for future readers.
Regards,
Doug
