We have a strong need for additional functionality from Scenario Planner or can you explain how I can get the functionality in the current product. | Community
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TrishaGr
Level 2
October 13, 2021
Question

We have a strong need for additional functionality from Scenario Planner or can you explain how I can get the functionality in the current product.

  • October 13, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 1474 views

We use Scenario Planner and it has been a great tool to provide us insight and data for our planning and shows us what we can accomplish with our current resources. However, a few of our challenges or current asks would be:

  1. We have several product managers that own and manage the data that is needed for our Technology plan (including the projects, durations, dependencies, and resources by month). Are there plans to enable an auto-save feature or a locking feature that would only allow edits if a users checks the plan out and only allows one user to edit at a time. Currently the info is entered in a google sheet and updated in the plan by one person to avoid saving over each other if multiple are editing the plan at one time.
    1. A challenge is the reporting on the plan data. It is great to allocate the resources and identify the overallocations but if there are over allocations we need the ability to see in a report or view what other projects or initiatives those resources are being used for the specific months so we can make trade-off decisions,. The ability to build reports and dashboards in Workfront using the scenario planner data would be extremely valuable to us to determine the trade-off/impacts [an example of the view we are hoping for would be: (horizontal) Months, (vertical) Projects & an expand/collapse to view job roles needed & (center area) #Resources]. Today we have to open each project above the one in question to view the resources (clicking bar in plan) to determine the other projects using the resources the question project is over allocated for so tradeoff/delay decisions can be made.
    2. Ability to pull custom data into the plan to help us in our planning sessions. Such as pulling in our priority ranking, programs, portfolios or other valuable data that can be used in planning. Also having the ability to choose if you sync this back to the Workfront Project or visa versa would be great since when we do planning we are in scenario planner it would be nice to only have to make the update in one place and have it sync back and forth.
    3. Ability to pull resources from a Workfront project from something other than project tasks (planned hours). Can we set it up to enable us to pull resources from the budgeted area and also allow scenario planner to sync the data back to the plan as needed or by publishing to update the Workfront project with the latest data from the plan.
    4. Ability to add/adjust start & end dates in Workfront Project and select in the Scenario Planner if you want to sync the data again instead of having to remove the project and add it back in plus add all the resources again to get the latest workfront project data.
    5. The ability to set a over allocation threshold that is acceptable to avoid it from turning red if it is under a specified amount of overallocation (example: CRM developer over allocated less than 1 do not turn red, greater than 1 overallocated turns red)

We need a tool that can eliminate manual and redundant work currently being done in order for us to use Scenario Planner. Is there a schedule where I can see the Scenario Planner Roadmap for the next year? Our contract is up in June and we would like to see if this tool will get where we need it to be in the next 9 months.

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    2 replies

    K
    KyleSi
    Level 2
    October 14, 2021

    Hey Trisha! This is all great feedback, I'll reach out to you through your account team to get something set up so we can talk through these points and go over our upcoming roadmap.

    D
    DavidBa
    Level 3
    September 19, 2022

    I agree with these suggested improvements and have a few more to add to this list:

     

    1. Ability to customize the name of each scenario.
    2. Ability to associate a Scenario Plan to a Company or Group and only able to allocate resource roles assigned to that company or group.
    3. Ability to compare planned resources against actual project hours/FTEs. 
      BrentHat
      BrentHat
      Level 2
      January 10, 2024

      I recently documented our wishlist for the scenario planner so I might as well add here. Much of it overlaps with the comments from Trisha and David above. 

       

      The Scenario planner feels like a forgotten function of the tool. It’s very convenient for quickly getting projects added to Workfront as initiatives and moving them around, but it falls short in how it can be made more useful during project roadmap planning. 

       

      The function would need to include:

      • Project-to-project dependencies 
      • The ability to tie the start date of an initiative to the end date of another. This would be great for regular projects as well versus having to associate tasks within them.
      • Custom form editing
      • The ability to associate custom form data at the initiative level that would carry over after publishing.
      • Project summary view within the scenario planner
      • If an initiative is tied to a project, you can more easily see the project details without leaving the page.

       

       

      • More initiative dates options
      • The ability to sync resync my initiative dates with project dates.
      • More specific dates - monthly increments can be too broad

       

       

      • Reveal the Scenario Planner’s initiative rank as a value
      • Currently this isn’t reportable like the portfolio optimizer rank, but it would help if it was.

       

       

      • Merge or better integrate with the workload balancer
        • The current hours/FTE tracking of the current Scenario function is confusing and unusable. You can extend this same frustration with the disparate Calendar feature that is also useful in its own way, but disconnected from the way the rest of the tool functions. These features feel like they were designed for one company in mind, but don’t apply to everyone else.

       

      The use case that involves the scenario planner is:

      1. A marketing team of creatives begin to develop initiatives (project ideas) that align to the goals set by leadership
      2. The team adds these project ideas QUICKLY onto a roadmap view (Scenario Planner). 
        • They can move the initiatives around quickly and in correlation with actual projects. 
        • They can associate form data like objectives/goals, status, and relationship to other initiatives/projects with the initiatives in the planner.
        • They can publish to create or update projects, but also sync project changes back to the initiatives in the planner.

       

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