Working with Portfolio and Project Management OOTB

Use the Portfolio and Project Management module to initiate, plan, and manage a variety of IT projects and other projects across your organization.

Features

•Assign tasks to resources in teams across the organization.

•Manage and monitor budgets.

•Achieve specific goals within specified time frames to bring the project to completion.

Portfolio and Project Management User Roles

The following roles are available in the the Portfolio and Project Management module. Each role accesses different dashboards and workspaces:

•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. Portfolio Managers can create a project and assign it to a Project Manager. See Working with Portfolio Management and Getting Started with Portfolio and Project Management.

•Project Manager: Manages one or more concurrent projects. A project can be part of a portfolio, but it doesn't need to be. Project Managers can monitor the progress of a project, track budget allocations and expenditures, and view phases. Project Managers can also create and assign a project, but can't create or change some project specifics such as creating tasks for a phase.

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.

Dashboards

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.

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.