Portfolio what-if scenario planning, answered.
Modelling alternative versions of the portfolio before committing to one. You change the inputs — add an initiative, defer another, move a date, cut a budget — and see what happens to cost, capacity, delivery dates and strategic coverage across everything else. The point is to have the argument while it is still cheap, rather than six months into delivery.
A spreadsheet holds a snapshot that is already out of date when the meeting starts, and it has no connection to who is actually available. Scenarios in PPM Express are built from live portfolio data — current scores, budgets, allocations and delivery progress — so a scenario reflects the portfolio as it stands today, and re-running it next month costs nothing.
Which initiatives are in and which are out, their sequence and dates, the budget assigned to each, and the people allocated to them. Non-negotiable items can be pinned so that every scenario carries them — which is usually where compliance obligations and contractual commitments belong.
The portfolio itself. Scores come from the weighted criteria you configured, costs and forecasts from the financial data on each initiative, progress from the delivery tools you have connected — Azure DevOps, Jira, Microsoft Project, Planner, Smartsheet or monday.com — and availability from the resource plan.
The same way it is calculated everywhere else in PPM Express: from each person’s work week, calendar and calendar exceptions, with people allocated to initiatives in hours or percentage FTE. A scenario that over-commits a specialist shows it before the scenario is approved, rather than during the quarter it breaks.
They stay in the portfolio as deferred or unfunded, with their scores and business cases intact. That matters at the next planning round, because “what did we say no to, and why” then has an answer instead of a shrug.
Yes. Scenarios are compared side by side against the same objectives, the same money and the same people, so the trade-off between them is explicit rather than argued from memory.
Whoever owns the money and whoever owns the people. Scenario reviews fail when the capacity constraint is represented by a number nobody in the room is accountable for. The output is a funding decision, so the people who can take it need to be present.
It becomes the plan of record. Budgets, allocations and dates are published to the portfolio, the roadmap follows from it, and where a two-way connection is configured the agreed changes can reach the delivery tools rather than stopping at the steering committee.
Quarterly re-ranking with monthly gate reviews is the pattern most enterprises settle on, plus an unscheduled run whenever something material moves — a budget cut, a reorganisation, an acquisition, a regulatory deadline. Re-running costs almost nothing, which is rather the point.
No. Modelling happens in the portfolio layer, and nothing is written to Azure DevOps, Jira or any other connected tool while a scenario is in draft. Teams see a change only once a scenario is approved and published, and only where you have configured a connection that writes back.
Structured approach to evaluate and prioritize new ideas.
Integrations
Capacity from real work weeks, so over-allocation surfaces before you commit.
Resource Planning
What leadership sees when every delivery tool reports into a single portfolio view.
Strategy
Last updated 20 August 2026
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