Forecast Refinement: Add Initiatives
Initiatives provide a way to incorporate forward-looking business context into your forecast. They are a powerful way to represent events, planned changes, or one-off overrides to your underlying forecast.
Initiatives contain some basic information like a name and description.
Calculating Impact
Each Initiative impacts one or more Cost Layers. To calculate the impact of an Initiative on a given Cost Layer, Cloud Capital uses the base Cost Layer (independent of any Initiatives) as the starting point, then applies the Absolute or Relative impact of the Initiative to a given Billing Period.
Tip: When representing complex projects, a single Initiative may affect multiple Cost Layers and include both positive and negative cost impacts.
Status
Initiative Status determines whether an Initiative will be included in forecast calculation. Once an Initiative is marked as Planned, it will begin to impact the forecast.
Note: Only Planned Initiatives impact the forecast. Draft and Abandoned Initiatives do not result in cost impacts.
Engineering Effort
Providing the T-Shirt size of the Initiative makes it possible to view the Effort vs Impact tradeoff of all your Initiatives.
Timeframe
Start Month and Duration describe the time during which an Initiative is active. For a Temporary initiative, these months are the only Billing Periods with impact calculated. Permanent Initiatives will repeat the value of the Finish Month indefinitely. Adjusting the Start Month shifts all months of the Initiative.
Impact: Absolute or Relative
Initiatives are applied as a set of changes (+/- costs) to a series of Billing Periods. You may provide these changes as either an absolute number (actual costs to apply per period) or a relative percentage (% of the baseline forecast to add or subtract).
Longterm Effect: Permanent or Temporary
You can specify whether the effects should continue after the active period of the Initiative has ended.
For example, an Initiative to “Deprecate an outdated service” would result in a Permanent effect (reduction in cost), while scaling up capacity in anticipation of a one-time event would be most accurately represented by a Temporary effect.
Examples
Any one off-change with impact on your Cloud Costs can be represented as an Initiative. Below are a few common scenarios:
| Scenario | Initiative |
|---|---|
Deprecate a Service | Permanent Initiative in a single month with negative absolute impact equal to the cost of the service that will be turned off. |