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Real Property / Advanced Forecasting / Advanced Portfolio Forecasting / Space & Portfolio Planning Console

Concept: Portfolio Scenario

A portfolio scenario depicts various ways you can allocate (assign space on a floor) to your organizational groups so that you can project future space needs, re-organize existing space, plan for moves and lease renewals, and so on. You can work with current space, as well as experiment with projected space needs (space forecasts). You can model space for a particular floor or you building, or you can model the space allocation in the entire portfolio.

Scenarios enable you to map out different options and then compare these options to decide the best one to implement. For example, you might have scenarios that:

reallocate current space to free up wasted space
arrange departments so that they are near the departments that they frequently interact with
model how you would allocate space under two different leases
show that the company requires new space to accommodate projected growth. For example, how much space would I need for each organizational group and how would I allocate it if the company were to grow 25 percent over the next three years
model the advantages of remaining in two different buildings versus expanding in one building

To model how you can allocate space for different scenarios, you work with stack plans, which depict each floor's area on a bar in a bar chart and enable you to position the organizational groups and their required area within each floor bar. You can rearrange the organizational groups on the bar chart to come up with a configuration for each floor that optimizes space and best meets your goals.

Once you work with scenarios that model different allocations of space, you can compare the scenarios and determine the best one to implement. For example, you might work on a scenario that models your projected growth and find that your company will soon outgrow its current leased space. You can then create a scenario that shows how you'd allocate space if you renew your current lease and take on more space in the current building, as well as a scenario that models moving to the entire company to a new building. You can compare these scenarios and determine which one best meets your needs.

Buildings and Floors

To work with a stack plan and allocate space to organizational units, you can work with buildings and floors that are already in your inventory. as well as projected space that you will acquire in the future. For example, if you are allocating a forecast that calls for 10 percent growth and your space is now at full capacity, you can add a new space to the scenario. This space could be in the form of leasing a new floor in your current building or could be a completely new building that you will lease in the future. In mapping out a projected need, you don't need to exactly know exactly which space you will occupy in the future, but only that you will require this space.

For more information, see Add Existing Space to a Scenario and Add New Space to a Scenario.

Space Needs for Organizational Units

In order to model space allocation with a scenario, you must define the space needs for each organizational unit: how much space does a department require now? how much space will it require next year? what new departments will we add and what will there space needs be? Depending on your practices, the organizational space needs can come from a few places:

Start from your baseline inventory (generated from your current Archibus space inventory). You can work with the inventory as it currently exists and re-allocate it, or you can adjust the generated values of the baseline inventory so that you can represent small changes to your inventory. To generate a baseline inventory, you create a space requirement and then import this space requirement to the project scenario. See Define Space Requirements Task: Overview
Work with forecast areas. To determine forecast areas, you can generate space requirements from current inventory and then manually enter into the Period fields the projected requirements for each forecast period. Depending on how many forecasts you want to model, you complete as many Period fields as desired. You then bring the forecast space requirements into the scenario. See Add Space Requirements to a Portfolio Scenario.
Enter the area you want to allocate to an organizational unit using the Space & Portfolio Console's "Allocations: Add" button and then completing the Add Allocated Area form with the organizational unit and the amount of area you want to allocate to this unit. This is handy for creating allocations for future organizations that might not exist in inventory. See Adding New Allocations to the Stack Plan.

Allocation Events

In your scenario, you will want to represent the space at different times -- or allocation events -- such as the event of a lease renewal, a reorganization of a business unit, a merger, an expansion that requires several new hires, moving a department, a forecast five years out, a temporary move for a construction project, and so on.

An allocation that exists for one allocation event, may not exist for another. For example, your starting point allocation event may contain two allocations for the HR department to reflect space on floors 1 and 2. However, as you forecast space needs for the future and realize that you will be downsizing, the allocation event for the 5-year forecast may show that you need only the HR space on floor 1.

Scenarios and Projects

Linking Projects to Portfolio Scenarios and Space Requirements