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Understanding the Role of Portfolio in Project Portfolio Management

portfolio

At its core, Project Portfolio Management (PPM) involves the centralized management of a collection of projects, known as a portfolio, to align with overarching organizational goals and strategies. Understanding the term “Portfolio” within PPM is fundamental to grasping the essence of this management approach.

A Portfolio in PPM refers to a curated selection of projects grouped together based on various criteria, such as their alignment with business objectives, resource requirements, or strategic importance. Our blog post exploration will share what a project portfolio is and the definition of the portfolio within PPM. We will show its significance and how it contributes to the success of organizational project management endeavors

Portfolio in PPM: Explained

What is a project portfolio? Portfolio in project portfolio management is a key concept for effective project governance and strategic alignment. It involves grouping projects based on criteria like strategic alignment, resource availability, and risk tolerance. Unlike managing projects individually, PPM focuses on managing portfolios as a whole to optimize resource allocation and minimize risks.

Within a project portfolio several components play crucial roles in a project portfolio management system:

  • Project Descriptions: Each project within the portfolio is accompanied by a concise description outlining its objectives, scope, deliverables, and key stakeholders.
  • Project Prioritization: Projects are ranked or categorized based on their strategic importance, potential impact, resource requirements, and alignment with organizational goals.
  • Performance Metrics: Key performance indicators (KPIs) are established to measure and evaluate the success, progress, and outcomes of projects within the portfolio.
  • Portfolio Governance: Policies, procedures, and guidelines governing the management, oversight, and decision-making processes related to the portfolio.
  • Stakeholder Communication: Regular communication and reporting to stakeholders to provide updates on project status, progress, and alignment with strategic objectives.
  • Portfolio Review and Evaluation: Periodic assessments and reviews of the portfolio to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement, enabling informed decision-making and continuous optimization.
  • Project Portfolio Management Software: Project portfolio management software plays a pivotal role in the effective management of project portfolios. Completix empowers your team to navigate and succeed in even the most intricate projects effortlessly, ensuring peace of mind at every step. With our comprehensive suite of tools for project management, Completix enables organizations to manage their project portfolios effectively.

Understanding portfolio in project management is crucial for organizations aiming to streamline project management practices, enhance strategic alignment, and achieve overall business success. It allows organizations to manage multiple projects efficiently, distribute resources wisely, and maximize returns while minimizing risks.

portfolio

Purpose and importance of portfolios in PPM

The purpose and importance of portfolios in project portfolio management are multifaceted and essential for organizational success. It includes:
  • Alignment with Strategic Objectives: Portfolios in PPM serve to align projects with the overarching strategic goals and objectives of the organization. By grouping projects based on their strategic relevance, portfolios ensure that resources are allocated to initiatives that contribute most effectively to the organization’s mission and vision.
  • Resource Optimization: Portfolios enable organizations to optimize the allocation of resources, including finances, personnel, and technology, across multiple projects. By managing resources collectively within portfolios, organizations can avoid duplication of efforts, minimize resource conflicts, and maximize the overall efficiency and effectiveness of project execution.
  • Risk Management: Portfolios facilitate risk management by providing a holistic view of potential risks and uncertainties across all projects. Organizations can develop proactive mitigation strategies and allocate resources more effectively to minimize the impact of adverse events on project outcomes. How? By identifying and assessing risks at the portfolio level.
  • Decision-Making Support: By evaluating projects within the context of the portfolio, organizations can prioritize initiatives that align with strategic objectives, mitigate risks, and maximize returns on investment. Portfolios provide decision-makers with comprehensive information and insights to make informed decisions regarding project selection, prioritization, and resource allocation.
  • Performance Monitoring and Evaluation: Portfolios enable organizations to monitor and evaluate the performance of projects collectively against predefined objectives and benchmarks. By tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) at the portfolio level, organizations can identify trends, assess project progress, and make data-driven decisions to optimize portfolio performance and achieve desired outcomes.
In essence, portfolios play a critical role in PPM by aligning projects with strategic objectives, optimizing resource distribution, managing risks, supporting decision-making, and monitoring performance. By leveraging portfolios effectively, organizations can enhance their project management capabilities, drive business value, and achieve long-term success.
portfolio

Benefits of portfolio management

Overall, portfolio management offers numerous benefits, including strategic alignment, resource optimization, risk management, decision-making support, performance monitoring, governance enhancement, and stakeholder communication improvement. The benefits of portfolio management are extensive, contributing significantly to organizational success. Why project portfolio management is important? Among the listed above, the pros include:
  • Faster Time-to-Market: By prioritizing and effectively managing projects within a portfolio, organizations can accelerate the delivery of products and services to the market, gaining a competitive advantage.
  • Increased ROI: Portfolio management helps organizations maximize returns on investment by prioritizing projects with the highest potential for value creation and aligning resources accordingly.
  • Adaptability to Change: Portfolio management enables organizations to adapt to changing market conditions, stakeholder priorities, and internal dynamics. It is by providing flexibility in project selection and resource allocation.
These benefits collectively contribute to organizational success and competitiveness in dynamic environments.

Relationship between portfolio and organizational goals

The connection between the portfolio and the organizational goals is key in ensuring the strategic direction and success of the organization. The portfolio serves as a connecting link between the main goals of the organization and the projects aimed at achieving them. Each project in the portfolio is carefully selected and aligned with the organization’s specific goals, whether they relate to increasing market share, increasing product innovation, or improving operational efficiency.

Through effective project portfolio management, resources are allocated strategically to prioritize projects that have the greatest impact on achieving these goals. In addition, regular monitoring and evaluation of portfolio performance ensure that projects remain aligned with changing organizational priorities, allowing flexible adjustments to be made to optimize results and achieve long-term success.

Thus, the portfolio acts as a dynamic mechanism for translating organizational aspirations into actionable initiatives that move the organization toward a desired future state.

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Changelog

Dec 14, 2024

  • New – Warning Center
  • Improved –  Portfolios – Added ability to create a portfolio of Programs
  • Improved – All Projects list now includes programs
  • Improved – Trigger settings page is better organized
  • New – Project rating triggers
  • Improved – Outlook Integration now has the ability to sync your Out of Office Availability
  • Improved – My Availability can be set in hours as well as days
  • Fix – Various bug fixes and UI tune-ups

Nov 18, 2024

  • New – Task Templates
  • Improved –  Search can find checklist items in tasks
  • Improved – Budget. Cell-assignment has, for each resource, an added total and total to date field.
  • Improved – Adding user to project  has a new interface where multiple team member can be added by selecting form a list
  • New – Timesheet report export has an added option to export all months on record.
  • Improved – Outlook Integration now has the ability to sync your Out of Office Availability
  • Improved – My Availability can be set in hours as well as days
  • Fix – Various bug fixes and UI tune-ups

Oct 16, 2024

  • New – Outlook 2-way Integration
  • Improved –  Forecast calculation
  • Improved – Allocation. When effort-driven is enabled, Task s in allocation now show start/end dates
  • Improved – Timesheet functionalities
  • Fix – Various bug fixes

Aug 29, 2024

  • New – Users Calendar. Unified view of all user’s calendar
  • New – Vacation calendar. Visualize your resources’ vacations in a searchable centralized calendar
  • New – Allocation Gantt. A new view that represent resources’ allocation in a Gannt chart
  • New – My Availability. Each user can set their own working time and days off. The availability is fully automated with the schedule, forecast and allocation
  • New – Effort based schedule. You can now assign effort to tasks in the schedule and report them in the Timesheet. Timesheet entries are automatically calculated and pre-populated.
  • New – Task based Timesheet. You can now report time against assigned schedule’s tasks. This functionality is tied to Effort based schedule.
  • New –  Each project has a dedicated general chat
  • New –  Timesheet custom entries. Add non-billable hours to the timesheet and visualize reports. For example you can track a resource’s vacation days.
  • New –  Added new interactive resources’ effort reports with time/cost views
  • New – Multi-Language support
  • Improved –  Timesheet reports now include “To Date” tally
  • Improved – In the resource view, actuals and forecast are now displayed side-by-side
  • Improved – Vendors logos are now automatically added to the vendor component.
  • Improved – New schedule, forecast and actuals triggers have been added to improve the warning engine
  • Improved – Search functionality now includes RAID items
  • Improved – Gantt charts have a new rounded look and have the resource(s) assigned visible in the bar
  • Improved – Raid. You can now hide all RAID items, while in list view, that are closed with the click of a button.
  • Change – Allocation calculation are no longer tied to the project end, and instead rely on the allocation calendar
  • UI tune-up– All dashboards have bigger graphic counters and a new coloring scheme to clearly separate the budget data from the rest.
  • Fix – Various bug fixes

Jun 7, 2024

  • New – Change Request impacting the schedule are now automatically updating the “Approved end date” of the project and are clearly flagged. 
  • New – Project duration (in days) is now displayed in the overview page and in the status report. 
  • Improved – Schedule and RAID filters have been improved
  • New – Baseline capability has been added to the schedule
  • New – Schedule history is now available. The schedule automatically save itself and provides multipole restore points
  • Improved – New triggers have been added to the warning engine to better support more use cases
  • New – Search is now available across the entire site  and covers multiple items
  • Improved: project search now includes RAID items
  • New: In the Simplified view, we have added the Tasks Kanban view. The Kanban view is now the default one

Apr 20, 2024

  • New – Document search is indexed and fully integrated with external drives (OD. GD. etc).
  • Improved – Schedule and RAID filters have been improved 
  • Improved – Milestones in gantt chart are placed in different level when colliding
  • Improved – CSV exports data improvement
  • Improved – Dashboards columns are also customizable “per user” and can be set directly in the dashboard.
  • Fix – Fixed bugs in schedule and RAID where resources couldn’t be copied via context menu

Mar 16, 2024

  • New – OneDrive Integration (2-way) 
  • New – Google Drive Integration (2-way)
  • New – Schedule Kanban view
  • New – Tracking and Operational initiatives have been simplified and add the ability to migrate to a full project
  • Improved – Document templates can now be organized into folders

Jan 29, 2024

  • Improved – Site Settings’ UI has a new look with explanation and guide
  • New – Portfolio status can now be exported unified 
  • New – Jira Integration (2-way)
  • New– MS Project Integration (2-way)
  • New– Simplified view – Record is committed automatically

Dec 22, 2023

  • New – Introduced a FREE plan
  • New – Introduced a new trigger-based Warning engine
  • New – Added charts for budget’s status
  • New– Added Portfolio Manager role
  • New– Added Portfolio view in My Dash for assigned Portfolio Managers
  • New – Project type can be hidden if not in use
  • Improved – Status reports now export in PDF landscape for better readability

Nov 25, 2023

  • Fix – Bugs and UI tune-ups
  • New – RAID Cards in Kanban mode have an updated look
  • New – Added 5 custom budget fields. You can track your own custom financial targets and display them in the various dashboards and status reports
  • New – Budget templates can now be created by importing directly from MS Excel
  • New– When, in a project, components are hidden, all related options are also hidden
  • New– Added a Resource view for Portfolios

Nov 5, 2023

  • Fix – Bugs and UI tune-ups
  • New – Introduced Operational and Task Tracking as type of initiatives
  • New – Project type tags are now colored differently for a better experience
  • New – Project types are now tracked in the Dashboards
  • New– Added ability to show/hide all details’ components separately in the Overview page 
  • New – Added a “Note” field in vendor expenses.

Oct 5, 2023

  • Fix – Bugs and UI tune-ups
  • New – Introduced Financials lock
  • New – Dashboards: added alert icons for values over the baseline 

Sep 6, 2023

  • Fix – Fixed FY calculation in PM Dashboard
  • New – Introduced a new Trial start Welcome guided setup
  • New – Table’s headers have a new and improved look
  • New – Added option to include/exclude any given project in the overall Budget and/or Financials calculations
  • New – Added option to enable/disable the budget fiscal on a per project basis

Aug 25, 2023

  • Fix – Bugs and UI tune-ups
  • Update – We updated all internal libraries to the latest version 
  • New – Introduced a Simplified project type to be used for task tracking type activities
  • New – Increased the number of components that can be turned off separately
  • New – Tasks can now be added directly from the dashboards
  • New – The Trial plan has been simplified by turning off, by default, all advanced components. All features can be turn back on in the Site settings
  • New – Individual users can now customize their dashboards by show/hide columns of data. Go to “My Account” to customize it.

Aug 10, 2023

  • Fix – Bugs and UI tune-ups
  • New – Grouping of resources in MyTeams
  • New – Pre-built budget “Estimates vs Actuals”
  • New – Status report now has a new widget: Summary bar
  • New – More components can be turned off separately
  • New – New tasks can be added directly from the dashboard
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