Organization initiative for planning budget and tracking spend

• In traditional portfolio management, there is a hierarchy with:
  • Program 1
    • ...
  • Program 2
    • Project A
    • Project B
  • Program 3
    • ...
• As a portfolio manager, or the head of a line of business, you may be supporting multiple programs and projects. That constitutes your "portfolio" of business.
• Programs and projects by definition, have a start and end. Your business might have a long-lived product. But with programs and projects, there are well-defined ROIs that accrue to the business, and along the way, necessitates updating the products/service offerings to your customers.
• Since we can't use "project" as a term in GitLab anymore to serve as the above for portfolio management, let's introduce a new abstraction called "initiative" that is at the highest level of hierarchy in an organization. The "initiative" can have multiple nested initiatives, so that it reflects programs and projects in traditional portfolio management nomenclature.
• The most important strategic new feature set for GitLab, is that budgeting and tracking would be supported at this level. Note that in typical portfolio management tools, you can do roll-ups. But typically, customers find it very hard to follow the prescriptive roll-up structure of these tools. So customers usually don't actually use the roll-up features, but just do manual tracking in spreadsheets, and enter the final numbers at the top-level objects. So the strategy is to introduce these fields at the top-level initiative object in GitLb.
• Here is how the structure would work for an example conglomerate that has many lines of businesses in it's portfolio.
  • Initiative Alpha: 2020 first release of next-generation washing machines
    • ...
  • Initiative Beta: Get into the mobile business to hedge encroaching competition from technology companies
    • Initiative I: New line of tablets, partnering with Tanukiconn
      • ...
    • Initiative II: iPhone killer
      • Epic A from Group 1: Beta launch of hardware
        • Epic x: Screen R&D
        • Epic y: Fast wireless charging
        • ...
      • Epic B from Group 2: Android fork as phone OS
        • ...
      • ...
    • Initiative III: Wearables research initiative
      • ...
  • Initiative Gamma: Complete integration of home security company acquisition
    • ...
• Fields associated with initiative:
  • Timelines and dates
  • Budgets and actual spends
  • ROI
  • Risk
  • Strategy categories / labels
• Again, a lot of this information could be rolled-up from epics and issues. But the initial feature set would be focused on just building the abstractions, providing the fields and visualizations, especially the accounting features.