Rolling Wave

The Rolling Wave process lets you budget monthly, then define a window (usually one month back and three months forward) in which the budget and forecast will automatically be expanded into weekly periods.

As you move forward in time and advance the calendar to different periods, the historical period data is consolidated back to monthly values and a new set of future periods is expanded.

Benefits of using the Rolling Wave process include:

  • Because you can see earned value on a weekly basis, you are aware of problems early enough to apply corrective action. Often, waiting until the end of the month is too late to fix the problem.
  • Using the Rolling Wave process reduces the size of the database, so Cobra processes reports faster
  • Creating a baseline is simpler.

The New Calendar File Wizard lets you define the calendar, including setting up a calendar name and description, periods, productive hours, default period labels, and access control.

The calendar can be assigned to projects to define the periods used to spread budgets and forecasts and report on time phased project data.

The rolling wave process works best with 4 week/4 week/5 week periods, because the monthly dates will always contain a full week. However, at the end of the last month, you may end up with more fiscal periods than expected, because the end of the week might be one day before the end of the month. This will cause an extra fiscal period of only one day. If your fiscal calendar is month end, you will need to manually generate the weeks within the month end date to make sure that the week end date is the same as the month end date.

You can also run the Rolling Wave process through the API and the Cobra Web Service.