The Essential Project Forum

Pardon my inquiry as I am not a user, but a potential user if my organization acquires Essential (which is my hope).

One of the primary outputs of our EA program is Budget Forecasting each year for the next 8 fiscal years. For us, an individual item (application or technology) could have a different cost for each of those FYs - upgrades, add-ons, training, consultant reviews, etc.

My question: how is this handled in Essential?

Thanks in advance for your time and expertise,
Scott Parker
Enterprise Architect
City of Mesa, Arizona, USA

Hi Scott,

Every class has a budgets_for_element slot, so you can apply a budget to anything. We have a budget class and you can define Annual, Quarterly, Monthly or adhoc budgets for any instance. A budget can be categorised, and an instance can have multiple budgets.

We don't hardcode the categories so you can create your own and allow the views to pick them up. Saying that, I'm not sure what views we have on budgets but it's a few hours work to create one, probably along the lines of the cost views

John

Thanks John, I appreciate your answer.

Can a project be associated to an individual item (application or technology)?

If so, what are your thoughts to using Projects for this purpose?

Scott

Hi Scott,

Sorry for the slow response, lots on at the moment.

In Essential you have the concept of a Strategic Plan which Project(s) implement, i.e. we as architects define the set of changes we need to meet our target state and then work with the change teams to create a set of plans that implement those plans. The plan contains the impacted element(s) which can be pretty much anything, an app, a process, a technology product, etc and the nature of the change (retire, enhance, etc). We then map which project(s) will implement the changes required.

If you look in the meta model, we typically have an Enterprise Strategic Plan, we tie Planned Changes to those - They are PLAN_TO_ELEMENT_RELATIONs where you can define the element (the app, process, etc), the action (Enhance, Replace, etc - you can use your own terms) and the change activity (Project, but it could be Programme if you require).

Having said that, we are looking to allow you to tie the element directly to a project too, for those modelling bottom-up - it would be in the next major release if we agree to do it.

John

excellent, thanks very much!

@JohnM,

Any word on tying the element directly to a project too, for those modelling bottom-up?

Yes, the slot is called ca_impacted_elements on the Change Activity and the inverse from the class is impacting_change_activities

Thanks John