5. — Finance

5.1.1. Connecting Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Cash

Planning, programming, budgeting, and cash management interweave across time and through the lifecycle of projects. Changes that occur during one process trigger changes within the others. As projects are conceived, funded, created, and delivered, they draw from budget pools, spend cash, improve asset condition, and generate a multitude of data tracking requirements.

A primary objective of this chapter is to help engineering program and project managers by detailing how these financial factors impact their efforts to plan, prioritize, and execute program and project management. This chapter does so by summarizing past work of Program Management, DAF, DTD, Project Support, and others to help connect the relevant and recent procedures and policies.

5.1.2. How to Use PMO Dashboards

A Program and Project Tracking dashboard—developed in late 2019—provides regularly updated project funding and pool balances by CDOT region and asset or fund program. PMO is developing features in its dashboarding effort to assist in pool balance tracking. Through OnTrack implementation, these features will migrate into the OnTrack system in 2020. The implementation team will determine which existing transactions capture the needed information to track pool balances and what additional data must be provided with each transaction. 

Initiated by Region 3 with its “Uber Sheet” and by Region 5 with a system of access databases and spreadsheets, the Program and Project Tracking Dashboard enables regions to maintain their own Google Sheet for planned and programmed project data. Data from this Google Sheet is uploaded to the dashboard along with critical project-level financial information from SAP. The initial version of the dashboard offers four pages:

  • Page 1 of the Program and Project Tracking dashboard presents Budgeted Projects: This tab can filter by region to provide pool totals and projects budgeted (in SAP) against the pool totals.
  • Page 2 offers Planned Projects: This tab filters by region to forecast pool balances and projects planned, though not yet budgeted in SAP, against the pool balances.
  • Pages 3 and 4 also provide pool and project information but roll to the program level rather than to the region level.