Initiatives overview in the Scenario Planner

Last update: July 19, 2024

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As a business manager, you can create initiatives for plans in the Adobe Workfront Scenario Planner. For information about creating plans, see the article Create and edit plans in the Scenario Planner.

Initiatives overview

Using the Workfront Scenario Planner, you can estimate and review the following information for each initiative:

  • Estimate the kind and number of job roles that might be required to complete the initiative. This adds to the Required job role count for the plan as well as calculates the People Costs that you can review for an initiative.
  • Estimate the Fixed Costs associated with the work needed to complete the initiative.
  • Estimate the Planned Benefit that your company might gain when the initiative is completed.

To view information about your initiatives, you can access individual initiatives within a plan. For information about creating and accessing initiatives, see the article Create and edit initiatives in the Scenario Planner.

Considerations about initiatives

Consider the following when creating initiatives:

  • You must create a plan before you can create an initiative.

  • You can create initiatives from scratch or you can import projects into a plan. The projects become initiatives within the plan.

    For information about creating initiative from scratch, see Create and edit initiatives in the Scenario Planner.

    For information about importing projects into a plan to create initiatives from projects, see Import projects to plans in the Scenario Planner.

  • Initiatives are smaller planning units than plans and they are created only as part of a plan.

  • The shortest initiative can have a duration of 1 month. The longest initiative can have a duration of 5 years.

  • You cannot do actual work on an initiative. At the initiative level, you can define what resources are needed and what cost those resources will incur so you can start executing one of the demands of the plan. For example, if your company has a plan to expand and acquire a new office in a new location, your department might have an initiative to install the network infrastructure for that new location.

  • You can create multiple initiatives in a plan. With each initiative, you can outline a high-level strategy to accomplish the work in your department.

  • You can prioritize initiatives within a plan, to ensure that the most important initiative receives the most budget and the most resources.

  • When you create initiatives within a plan everyone that views that plan can also view all the initiatives within the plan.

  • You can publish initiatives to create projects or to update the projects that are linked to them. For information about publishing initiatives, see Update or create projects by publishing initiatives in the Scenario Planner.

Financial information about initiatives

You can review financial information about individual initiatives to understand how the initiatives fit within the plan. For information about accessing an initiative, see the article Create and edit initiatives in the Scenario Planner.

You can view the following financial indicators about an initiative by accessing it within a plan:

Costs total amount

This is a calculation of the total cost of an initiative.

Workfront calculates the total Costs value of an initiative using this formula:

Initiative Costs = Fixed Costs + People Costs

Fixed CostsThis is a manual entry where you can estimate a monthly amount of Fixed Costs for each month of the initiative. This does not include the costs associated with the roles added to the initiative which are captured in the People Cost field.
People Costs

This is a total calculation of the costs associated with the job roles of the initiative for the duration of the initiative. This number depends on how many FTEs or hours you estimate for a job role for each month of the initiative.

TIPS

  • The number of monthly FTEs for the same job role may be different from month to month.

  • Workfront considers that there are 160 working hours in one month.

Workfront calculates the People Costs of an initiative using the following formula:

Initiative People Costs = SUM(Monthly people cost)

Workfront calculates the Monthly People Costs for each month during the Initiative's duration using the following formula:

Monthly People Costs = SUM(Job role hourly rate * 160 * Number of FTEs)

EXAMPLE

If you have an initiative with a duration of 6 months that requires 1 Designer with a $50 hourly rate for 1 FTE every month and a Web Designer with an hourly rate of $100 for 2 months of the initiative, the People Costs of the initiative is calculated as follows:

Initiative People Costs = 50*160*6 + 100*160*2 = 48,000 + 32,000 = 80,000

Planned BenefitThis is a manual entry where you can estimate the overall benefit that your department would gain by completing this initiative.
Net Value amount

This represents the value of your initiative when taking into account the overall costs and the Planned Benefit estimated on the initiative. Workfront calculates the Net Value of an initiative using the following formula:

Initiative Net Value = Initiative Planned Benefit - Initiative Costs

Initiative information in reports

You can display initiative information in reports, as described in the table below. This information is available in your Workfront instance only when your company has purchased a Workfront Scenario Planner license.

Report typeInitiative information
InitiativeName, Duration, Start and End Dates, Entered by, ID, Last Published Date*, All Project fields including custom fields*
Initiative Job RoleAll Initiative information as listed above, (Job Role) ID, Project*, Project Assignment Planned Hours*, Initiative Job Role Hours, (Job Role) Count, All Project fields including custom fields*
Project*All Initiative information as listed above*

*These fields populate with information from the project linked to the initiative, only when the initiative was created from a project or was published to a project at least once. For information about publishing initiatives, see Update or create projects by publishing initiatives in the Scenario Planner.

More help on this topic

Previous pageImport projects to plans in the Scenario Planner
Next pagePlans overview in the Scenario Planner

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