The success of any project depends on many variables, but at the end of the day, your leaders and stakeholders typically care about two things: Will this project be delivered on time, and will it be delivered within budget?
Most organizations can answer each question individually. Finance teams can model cost, revenue, and margin. Workforce planning teams can model talent, skills, and resource allocation to determine talent capacity. However, without a shared view of both cost and capacity, planning becomes fragmented and delivery risk creeps in long before execution begins. In fact, only 35% of projects are completed on time and within budget.
When a strategic project or initiative fails to deliver its intended value, the immediate post-mortem often points to flawed execution. But the real failure often occurs much earlier in planning, and can be for several reasons, including:
- Project funding precedes validated staffing strategies
- Talent shortages and misalignment create delays and disruptions in strategic initiatives
- Misalignment or lack of project visibility and buy-in from cross-functional stakeholders
- Increased reliance on more expensive contingent labor is necessary to fill unanticipated skill gaps
- Aggressive timelines override realistic resource capacity constraints
- Work is prioritized based on resource availability rather than strategic value
The cause of these issues isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of transparency, orchestration, and integrated planning between the two functions that determine project success. This disconnect becomes more visible when you examine how organizations plan today.
The gap between investment, resources, and delivery
Finance plans the budget for projects and forecasts on quarterly or annual cycles. Workforce planning focuses on locations, roles, skills, and resource mix across hiring and contracting, or redeployment, and development. Meanwhile, business demand for new projects is continuous, fluid, and shaped by customers, markets, and competitive dynamics.
Finance, business, and HR teams plan rigorously but often separately, which means that prioritization becomes reactive. High-value initiatives can be delayed or deprioritized because critical skills are unavailable. Lower-value projects tend to advance simply because the resources exist. And operational leaders are forced into trade-offs that were never modeled or anticipated during funding.
Organizations are shifting to a more integrated approach that evaluates initiatives and projects through three key criteria:
- Strategic prioritization — is this the right work to focus on given our strategic goals?
- Financial viability — can we fund it and achieve the margins we intend?
- Resource capacity and skills feasibility — do we have the right talent to deliver it at the right time and cost?
Until these questions are answered together, every funded project introduces potential delivery risk. When these are viewed together, project planning evolves into a dynamic, continuous capability rather than a static budgeting exercise.
Closing the gap with connected cost and capacity planning
To help organizations close this gap, Anaplan delivers a single, connected solution through two intelligent applications that bring finance and resource capacity planning into the same conversation.
Connecting project investments to predictable financial outcomes
The Anaplan Project Cost Planning application empowers you to see the immediate financial impact of any change in project timeline, scope, or resources. This allows you to make critical decisions proactively, rather than reacting to outdated information.
With it, you can:
- Predict project costs and revenue using AI-driven forecasting
- Model the financial impact of delays, scope changes, and bottlenecks immediately
- Protect project margins by incorporating detailed labor rates and revenue drivers
- Align investments with corporate financial goals through integration with Integrated Financial Planning application
- Calculate true profitability by unifying revenue forecasts with labor costs captured from the Project Resource Planning application
These capabilities allow finance to optimize capital allocation toward the highest-value initiatives and ensure that project investments deliver their intended return. The application deploys through a guided setup process, is fully extensible without code, and integrates directly with your ERP and other source systems to accelerate adoption while reducing implementation risk.
But financial viability is only half the picture. The most accurate cost forecast is meaningless if you don't have the people to do the work. This is where the financial plan connects seamlessly to resource capacity.
Aligning talent and capacity to strategic project demand
The Anaplan Project Resource Planning application provides real-time visibility into workforce demand and availability, talent mix, and sourcing strategies across employees and contractors, enabling organizations to allocate the right people to the right work at the right time.
With it, you can:
- Aggregate project demand from PPM, CRM, and other systems into a single forward-looking plan
- Translate high-level demand into role, skill, location, and cost-specific requirements
- Model hiring versus redeployment versus contractor strategies based on feasibility and financial impact
- Evaluate utilization and profitability across the portfolio
- Model multiple “what-if” scenarios to compare alternative paths
- Reprioritize initiatives and allocate resources to the most strategic and profitable work
By connecting resource plans with project budgets and hiring plans, organizations gain a workforce strategy that is directly aligned with financial goals rather than reconciled after the fact.
From funded to feasible to profitable
The power lies not in either application alone, but in their continuous, bidirectional connection. When a project manager models a three-month delay in the Project Cost Planning application, the resource manager instantly sees the impact on team availability in the Project Resource Planning application. When a decision is made to hire contractors instead of full-time employees, the financial plan is immediately updated with the new cost structure.
This creates a dynamic loop where project planning is no longer a static budgeting exercise, but a strategic capability for making real-time trade-off decisions with full confidence.
The combined outcome is:
- The right initiatives get prioritized
- The right resources get allocated
- Margins are protected throughout delivery
- Plans adapt dynamically as assumptions and scope change
Instead of discovering constraints late during staffing or execution, teams can model them proactively, compare scenarios, and make decisions with confidence. This also changes the nature of commitments. Organizations can confidently pursue new business, accelerate transformation initiatives, or support customer demand knowing that both capital and talent are aligned to the work.
In a landscape where talent is scarce, capital is scrutinized, and transformation is critical, the organizations that can align investment with capacity before work begins are the ones that outperform their competitors.
