Whiteboard: Project Portfolios

Reporting on individual projects is wonderful. But reporting on entire portfolios is even better. When you can get reports or graphs on portfolios of projects, you can see which one is the most important to you. Those are usually the ones you are spending the most time and money on. In other words, you're getting intel on the entire collection of projects, called a portfolio.

Group Your Projects into Collections

"Project portfolios are black boxes to us"

Now compare your results with your stated company goals.

Do your goals line up with what you're actually seeing in the field? In other words, are you actually spending time and money on the portfolios that you want to? Or on secondary goals? (Oops, not interested in portfolios? Jump over here for individual project totals.)

The timesheet doesn't lie.

Watch the video and then read a discussion of project portfolios below.

What is project portfolio management?

Think of a collection of projects as a black box you can't see into. All you can see is the results. You can see how many hours you've logged. You can see how much the project has cost you, and how much you've earned. But you don't care which individual projects make up the portfolio.  You just care that they are all linked by some common connection.

Like: all the projects in the portfolio are managed by a certain division in the organization. Or managed by the same PM. Or serve certain product lines.

You manage the entire collection, and view its productivity and revenue as a single entity. A black box.

That is project management portfolio.

"I like the higher level value we get from this"
"Like custom reports"

How does the timesheet work with portfolios?

It doesn't, directly. End users still see their individual projects in their timesheets. They still log time to tasks. And they usually don't even realize their projects are inside portfolios. So from that standpoint, the timesheet doesn't care if projects are in portfolios or not. Users can log time to them even when they are not. So, from that perspective portfolios are optional. The real value is at the management level.

Portfolios are for use in the executive and management levels. End users often don't know they exist. But company execs can get the high-level intel they need to adjust priorities and make course corrections. This is one of the main reasons time sheets exist.

"Each division in our company is a portfolio"

What value do you get?

Here are some benefits to consider. Just keep in mind that this value is almost exclusively at the management level, not the end-user level.

1. View revenue for a portfolio
2. View hours for a portfolio, filtered by any group or date range
3. View resource allocation for a selected portfolio
4. See employee availability for a portfolio
5. Create custom reports that include portfolio details

"Breaking revenue down by portfolio is exactly what we needed."

This article Whiteboard: Project Portfolios was first seen on http://www.stdtime.com