Plan portfolio scenarios

Scenario planning lets you ask “what if?” about a portfolio without touching the real projects: what happens to budget and workload if we defer Project A, cut Project B, and add a hypothetical new initiative in Q3? Scenarios are sandboxes, nothing in them changes live project data.

Create a scenario

1. Open Portfolio Manager, select a portfolio, and switch to the Scenario Planning tab.

2. Select New Scenario and give it a name that states the hypothesis, for example “Budget Cut 20%” or “Add Project Alpha”.

3. Add the portfolio’s projects to the scenario and set each one to Include, Exclude, or Defer.

4. Optionally override a project’s budget, start date, or end date inside the scenario to model a trimmed or shifted version of it.

5. You can also add a hypothetical project that does not exist yet: give it a name, dates, a budget, and a team size (headcount), and the scenario treats it like real demand.

Read the impact analysis

The Impact Analysis tab compares the scenario against the portfolio as it stands today:

• Budget: the scenario’s total (included projects, with any budget overrides applied) against the portfolio’s baseline total.
• Timeline: the combined date range the included projects span.
• People: projected hours per person across the included projects, compared with their recorded capacity, so over-allocation shows up before you commit to the plan.

Tip

Keep one scenario per question. Three small scenarios (“defer Alpha”, “cut budgets 20%”, “both”) compare more cleanly than one scenario you keep editing.

Permissions

Viewing scenarios comes with the Enterprise plan’s scenario planning feature. Creating, editing, and deleting scenarios requires the scenario management permission, which defaults to organization owners and admins and can be adjusted in the permission matrix.

FAQs

Do scenarios change my real projects? No. A scenario only stores its own overrides and include/exclude/defer choices. Adopting a scenario means applying those decisions to the real projects yourself.

How are hypothetical projects staffed in the analysis? Their estimated workload is spread evenly across the team size you gave them, using standard full-time weeks, so they add plausible demand without naming real people.

Can portfolio managers build scenarios? By default scenario management sits with owners and admins, since scenarios often contain sensitive what-if budget data. An owner can widen this in the permission matrix if your portfolio managers own that work.