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Working with Portfolio and Project Management

•About Portfolio and Project Management

•About Managing Budget Allocations for Portfolios and Projects

•Getting Started with Portfolio and Project Management

•Working with Portfolio Management

•Working with Project Management

•Project and Portfolio Module Business Object Reference

About Portfolio and Project Management

The Portfolio and Project Management module allows you to initiate, plan, and manage a variety of IT projects and other projects across your organization. You can assign tasks to resources in teams across the organization, manage and monitor budgets, and achieve specific goals within specified time frames in order to bring the project to completion.

There are two roles associated with the Portfolio and Project Management module. Each role accesses different dashboards and different workspaces. Based on your role, you can view, edit, and update a project, and you can monitor the health and progress of a project. The roles and their functions are as follows:

•Portfolio Manager: Manages portfolios of projects. Each portfolio can consist of one or more concurrent projects, and each project can be owned by a different project manager. The Portfolio workspace displays an overview of the portfolios and the projects assigned to each. Project Managers can monitor the progress of a project, track its budget allocations and expenditures, and view its phases. Project Managers can also create and assign a project, but cannot create or change some project specifics such as creating tasks for a phase. Select a portfolio to view a list of all projects and select a project to view project information.

The Portfolio workspace is available to Portfolio Managers. Use this workspace to create a new portfolio, then add projects to the portfolio. Use unique names for each portfolio.

For more information about portfolios, see Working with Portfolio Management. For a quick overview of how to create a new portfolio, see Getting Started with Portfolio and Project Management.

•Project Manager: Manages one or more concurrent projects. A project can, but does not need to be, part of a portfolio. The Project dashboard displays an overview of the projects that are in progress. Select a project to edit or change the project phases and tasks. Portfolio Managers can create a project and assign it to a Project Manager.

The following workspaces are available to create, view, edit, and manage projects, phases, and tasks:

•Project workspace: Create new projects from this workspace. The workspace lists all projects owned by you as a Project Manager. Once a project is created it can be linked to a portfolio.

•Project Calendar workspace: View projects owned by you as a Project Manager. All projects, phases and tasks that have a status of active are displayed. You can search for a project by project number to display only the tasks and phases for that project. Once a task or phase has a status of active, it is displayed even if the status changes at a later date.

For more information about projects, see Working with Project Management. For an overview of how to set up and manage a new portfolio or project, see Getting Started with Portfolio and Project Management

About Managing Budget Allocations for Portfolios and Projects

Portfolio Managers can set a budget allocation for each portfolio, but this information is not shared with any of the projects that make up the portfolio. This is because each project can have a different budget allocation and is not tied to the single large allocation of the portfolio.

There are two ways to manage budget and costs:

•You can use a lump sum allocation to the portfolio and for each project connected to a portfolio. This requires that you enter the amounts directly into the Allocated field in the Portfolio workspace.

•You can define and enter a budget plan for each portfolio or a sub-budget plan for a project in the budget fields in the Portfolio workspace. For information on how to enter and define a plan, see Plan information under Adding Information on the Overview Tab.

The budget for a project can only be consumed by the tasks that are created for a project. That is, you must create tasks for each project. The amount consumed by each task on a project is displayed on the Overview tab in the Consumed field. The amounts for the Consumed field are combined for all projects within a portfolio and are displayed as a single figure in the Consumed field in the Portfolio workspace. For information about creating and editing sub-budget plans for projects, see Editing Sub-Budgets.

Example: Portfolio A has a total budget of $20,000.00.

It consists of three projects which have different amounts allocated: Project 1=$6000, Project 2=$5000, and Project 3=$9000. Project 2 has used $1000 of its allocated budget of $5000, and Project 3 has used $2000 of its allocated budget of $9,000. The Consumed field for Portfolio A shows the amount consumed by both projects ($3000), out of the $20,000 that was allocated for all projects in the portfolio.