Scenario Analysis with PlainPPM: test your options before you decide
The budget round is coming up. Twenty initiatives are on the table, and the funds cover twelve. Or the other way around: the portfolio has been approved, and in the middle of the year a major initiative comes along that nobody could have planned for. In both cases, the question isn’t whether a single project is good – it’s which combination of initiatives you can actually deliver with the money and the people you have.
That’s exactly what Scenario Analysis for PlainPPM is for. This article first shows how it works – and then explains when it’s worth the effort and what you need for it.
How Scenario Analysis works in PlainPPM
Scenario Analysis builds on your live data – but as a copy, so you can plan safely without touching your current planning. Ideas and ongoing projects sit together on one timeline, color-coded: projects in blue, ideas in green. You can sort by dates or by strategic contribution – that is, by the evaluation you’ve already given your initiatives.
From there, you work in four steps:
- Take ideas out. You immediately see what would be possible without them – in costs as well as in effort.
- Compare against capacity. A red line shows what your organization can handle; alternatively, you display the remaining availability directly. This turns a budget question into a feasibility question.
- Bring the best ideas back in and add them to the portfolio – you see right away which initiatives fit within your limits.
- Shift over time. You can move ideas and projects at the month, quarter or year level – postponing an initiative isn’t a defeat; it buys you information.
Alongside the timeline, there’s the table view. There you adjust costs and effort per month, quarter or year directly in the cell. You save your variants as scenarios and compare them side by side. Gantt Visual shows you how dates develop against the baseline.
There’s one thing Scenario Analysis deliberately doesn’t do: it doesn’t recommend any variant as “the best.” It makes the consequences of each variant visible – the choice remains a leadership decision. That’s exactly where its value lies: when you have to justify a decision, you don’t need an algorithm; you need a comparison that everyone can follow.
Scenario Analysis on video (in German)
Transcript (English translation)
Play through scenarios for ideas and projects. The interactive Scenario Analysis in PlainPPM. All ideas and ongoing projects on one timeline – projects in blue, ideas in green. Your live data from PlainPPM serves as the data basis – available as a copy you can plan with safely. Sort by dates or by strategic contribution. Take the ideas out – and you immediately see what’s still possible: in costs as well as in effort. Compare the figures against capacity – the red line shows what your organization can handle. Or display the remaining availability directly. Now select the best ideas and add them to the portfolio. You see right away which initiatives you should pursue. To optimize further, simply shift ideas and projects over time – at the month, quarter or year level. Alongside the Gantt, there’s the table view: there you adjust costs and effort per month, quarter or year directly in the cell. Save your scenarios and compare variants – for decisions on solid ground. You’ll find Scenario Analysis in the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk – try it right away in the trial environment. Get started with ease and grow together.
When a scenario analysis pays off
A quick clarification first, because the term is used for different things in everyday language: a forecast tells you what is likely to happen. A simulation calculates many random runs. A scenario analysis answers a different question – what does the portfolio look like if we decide differently? So it’s not a judgment of probability but a basis for decisions: it captures what applies if a particular decision is made.
Five situations in which the effort regularly pays off:
- Annual planning and the budget round. More project applications than funds – the standard situation. Variants answer the question of which bundle fits within your limits.
- A budget cut during the year. “Ten percent less.” Without variants, cuts are made across the board – a little everywhere. That’s almost always the worst solution, because in the end a lot has been started and little has been finished.
- A bottleneck in a key role. The question isn’t who works more, but which initiative has to give way so the others can deliver.
- A major initiative is added. The only reliable answer to “we’re doing this on top now” is a variant that shows what it pushes out.
- Before an external commitment. Before you commit to a date with a committee or a customer, a scenario comparison provides evidence that the commitment is realistic.
The common pattern: scenario analysis pays off when a decision affects several initiatives at once and resources are limited. For a single-project decision, it isn’t worth the effort; looking at dependencies and dates is enough.
The method itself isn’t new: it comes from strategic foresight and became well known in the 1970s, because organizations that were prepared reacted to market disruptions faster than those that had relied on a single forecast. Add to that an idea from the world of finance: when resources are limited, what counts isn’t the best individual investment but the best combination. Applied to projects, this means that the strongest project in the portfolio is of little use if it blocks three others.
What you need
- The complete portfolio, including the ideas that haven’t been approved yet. If you only look at ongoing projects, you’ll shift dates but never decide on anything new.
- Rough but consistent estimates. Accuracy is secondary; comparability is everything: two variants should differ only in what you’ve deliberately changed.
- A defined data set. Every scenario needs a reference point for the calculations.
- Capacity data. Otherwise the calculation shows money, but not feasibility.
- Criteria that are set in advance. If they’re only chosen afterward, the analysis merely justifies the result you wanted.
Frequently asked questions
A forecast tells you what is likely to happen. A scenario describes what the situation would look like if you chose a particular option. That’s why scenarios aren’t a judgment of probability but a basis for decisions.
Usually three to five. Beyond that, the effort goes up, not the clarity — and the decision meeting ends without a decision.
No, but consistent ones. What matters is comparability between the variants, not the accuracy of each individual figure. That said, a portfolio with patchy effort data produces variants that look good but are worth little.
No. Scenario Analysis makes the consequences visible; you make the choice. Automatic optimization is deliberately not part of it.
Yes. A copy of your live data serves as the starting point, so you can plan without changing your current plan.
When only a single initiative is up for discussion, or when neither budget nor capacity is limited. Its value comes from several initiatives competing for the same resources.
Conclusion
Portfolio decisions rarely fail because a single figure was wrong. They fail because nobody saw the consequences of a selection before it was approved. That’s exactly the gap Scenario Analysis closes: it puts variants side by side, calculates them against the available capacity and shows what a decision pushes out.
Try it out for yourself. Scenario Analysis is ready for you in the PlainPPM Feature Kiosk: open the extension with sample data in the trial environment and play through a budget cut or an additional major initiative – without changing anything in your own environment. If it’s a good fit, we’ll build it into your PlainPPM environment; the core of PlainPPM stays unchanged.
PlainPPM is project and project portfolio management built entirely on standard Microsoft 365 – native to Microsoft 365, optimized for Microsoft Teams, built on the Microsoft Power Platform. Book a demo
