The ‘What-If’ Advantage: Overcoming Competing Priorities with Scenario-Based Portfolio Planning
For every business managing risks is the most critical and challenging task, especially in multi-project management. Why? The answer is simple: because every decision you make inevitably affects all processes and workflows.
In this case, scenario planning software is the most effective way to overcome these challenges and to deal with uncertainty while making vital decisions. Such tools as What-if analysis becomes essential in reaching the best outcomes while managing worst scenarios and finding proper ways to address them.
Let’s now take a closer look at what is scenario planning, its benefits and impact on the project portfolio.
What Is Scenario Planning?
Scenario planning is a strategic process when you run different scenarios to see possible outcomes and risks. It allows companies to simulate changes in requirements, features, and deadlines and see the impact on the project portfolio.
Traditional static planning that is done manually has several limitations that lead to unreliable forecasts and slow decision-making, while scenario planning lets you experiment and test ideas without a fear of making a mistake.
The main goal is to forecast and manage risks while ensuring that all projects are meeting demands on time within budget, without touching live data. This approach is especially important when you have multiple concurrent projects and even one single thoughtless change can cause a chain reaction across the project portfolio.
Benefits of Using Scenario Planning Software
Actually, the benefits of using scenario planning software go far beyond reducing risks. With integrating such a powerful tool into your workflows you’ll get:
- Proper prioritization.
Scenario planning software helps you to evaluate the most important and urgent project in your portfolio to deliver it on time, by showing consequences of your decisions. Also it helps you to shift priorities if a company’s strategic goals have changed.
- Improved resource optimization.
What-if analysis gives you the opportunity to see how changes in resource allocation will affect overall portfolio performance. It shows exactly where resources might be overbooked if you make a change and gives insights on how to allocate them wisely.
- Enhanced decision-making.
What-if analysis replaces manual spreadsheets and outdated data with clear, real-time insights about all projects within the portfolio for executives and project managers to ensure that decisions will bring desired outcomes.
- Predicting risks and bottlenecks.
Scenario planning software gives you early warnings about risks and bottlenecks while making changes in projects. By predicting delays or spots in budget in advance you’ll be able to test different ideas on how to avoid costly surprises.
- Increased efficiency and profitability.
When you’re prepared for changes, projects are prioritized well and deadlines are realistic, teams spend less time on firefighting and more time delivering value, which leads to better project outcomes and strengthening your market position.
How Scenario Planning Software Improves Project Portfolio
The benefits described above directly address common difficulties in multi-project management, like:
- Limited visibility within portfolio;
- A lack of real-time insights;
- Resource conflicts;
- Complexity of identifying high-level risks early;
- Preventing or dealing with scope creep;
It allows you to simulate changes in the independent environment without touching live project data. You can change milestones, priorities, task assignment, and resource allocation in a sandbox and see how it might affect real outcomes.
Scenario Planning with Epicflow
What-if analysis mode is designed directly for building and simulating scenarios for multiple simultaneous projects across a portfolio, without touching real data. Also it allows you to see how changes will affect the project portfolio management in the future and make right decisions to manage uncertainty.
Key features of What-if scenario planning software include:
- Project Staggering: rank projects by how important they are to the business and set a number as a filter for staggering. What-if analysis will calculate a better plan and suggest changes to keep projects on track.
- Load Simulation: use this feature to see how adding or removing team members affects task duration. What-if scenario planning software handles all resource-related information and comes up with the best solution.
Also you can see impact across different levels:
- You can see the immediate effect while making changes.
- Capacity planning software predicts workload avoiding over-commitment in advance.
- Workload management software analyzes past bottlenecks to inform better future planning.
Epicflow scenario planning software provides these capabilities for effective project and resource planning. Want to learn more about Epicflow features, how they can improve your processes and ensure successful project delivery? Don’t waste your time and book a call with our experts.
Summing Up
Let’s summarise the most important points of this article:
- Scenario planning is a process of running different scenarios and seeing how they would impact projects or even the portfolio.
- Based on the real-time data, What-if analysis tools allow managers and executives to predict bottlenecks early and effectively deal with them, prioritize projects, improve resource allocation, and increase efficiency of processes.
- Scenario planning software helps to deal with problems like resource conflicts, identifying high-level risks, preventing the scope creep, and gaining real-time insights.
- Tools such as Project Staggering and Load Simulation allows you to simulate changes and see how they would affect task duration or calculate a better plan.
- Other features show the impact of changes on different levels: immediate impact, future predictions, and past experience.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why scenario planning software is important for a project portfolio?
Because project portfolio-level changes often lead to unpleasant consequences. Scenario planning software such as What-if analytic tool allows you to run different scenarios to detect problems across multiple projects and helps you avoid them.
How does scenario planning software benefit my business?
It improves efficiency of projects across the portfolio, prevents overload and budget overrun, helps you to prioritize projects according to real-time data and strategic goals, and speeds-up decision-making.
What are tools for scenario planning?
Tools like Epicflow can integrate with other already existing PM software to provide what-if analysis across your project portfolio, allowing you to simulate resource reallocation, based on AI-driven forecasting.
