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Project Portfolio Management

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What Is a Project Portfolio?

What is project portfolio management (ppm), project portfolio management vs project management, the project portfolio management process, what does a project portfolio manager do, 5 project management processes for ppm.

• Project Portfolio Management Software

Must-Have Features of Project Portfolio Management Software

How to use portfolio management software, project portfolio management roles & hierarchy, which industries and organizations benefit from ppm, project portfolio management (ppm) key terms.

A project portfolio is a collection of projects, programs and processes that are managed together and optimized for the financial and strategic goals of an organization. A portfolio can be managed at either the functional or the organizational level.

Unlike a project, which has a defined end goal or deliverable, a portfolio represents a more strategic planning commitment to continuously optimizing the allocation, prioritization and scheduling of resources across many projects.

Project portfolio management (PPM) is the analysis and optimization of the costs, resources, technologies and processes for all the projects and programs within a portfolio. Project portfolio management is typically carried out by portfolio managers or a project management office (PMO).

Related: 15 Free PMO Templates for Excel and Word

The key focus of PPM is to make sure that all the outcomes in the portfolio support the strategic goals and business objectives of the organization. The project portfolio manager or PMO does this through business analysis, reviewing budgets and forecasting while minimizing risk and managing stakeholder expectations.

Project portfolio management tools (PPM tools) are often used to collect and analyze that data to ensure that their project portfolio is aligned with the overall strategic planning and goals of the organization. ProjectManager has powerful, yet intuitive, tools for managing project portfolios. Track all your projects with a customized dashboard, manage your portfolio on a roadmap, even allocate resources across your projects. It’s easy to do all this and more with ProjectManager. Try it free.

ProjectManager’s portfolio dashboard is one of its many PPM tools .

In the hierarchy of business management, project portfolio management is the link between project management, which we will define briefly below, and enterprise management, which deals with the overriding vision, mission and strategic planning of the organization.

To understand where project portfolio management and project management differ, we must first define each and explore the areas where they diverge.

Project management is, quite simply, the management of a project. A project is a temporary endeavor that results in a product or service. It has a beginning and an end. Project goals are defined, and tasks are broken down into a schedule. Cost and budgets are set; resources are assigned, and stakeholders are reported to.

Project portfolio management, on the other hand, is a higher level approach that orchestrates, prioritizes and analyzes the potential value of many projects and programs in a portfolio to manage them simultaneously and optimize resource management. The goal of the portfolio management process is to manage and leverage the life cycle of investments, initiatives, programs, projects and outcomes to best reach the overall goals and objectives of an organization. Therefore, project management is a subset of project portfolio management. It leads to the ultimate objective, which is meeting the strategic goals of the organization.

There are five basic project portfolio management steps:

1. Define Business Objectives

Before you start thinking about portfolio management, you’ll need to understand your organization’s business objectives and strategic goals. The idea is that your project portfolio aligns with the strategic planning of your organization, so you’ll need to check if its financial objectives and customer value are good enough for your organization.

As a project portfolio manager you’ll need to reach an agreement about the strategic goals of the project portfolio with stakeholders, and then proceed to establish valuation criteria for project selection .

2. Collect Project Ideas for Your Portfolio

Once you’ve defined your portfolio’s strategic goals it’s time to start building it. To do so, you’ll need to start collecting projects. Those could be in-progress projects or project ideas that are similar enough to be managed simultaneously. Gather project management data and prepare the valuation criteria to choose the best.

3. Select the Best Projects for Your Portfolio

To determine which are your best projects for your portfolio, you’ll need to do a cost benefit analysis and use your valuation criteria. This valuation criteria will measure the amount of value that each project brings into the portfolio.

There are a variety of aspects that can go into the project selection scoring criteria, such as the payback period, net present value, or risk level.

4. Validate Project Portfolio Feasibility

Now that you’ve chosen the projects that are the best fit for your portfolio, it’s time to do a feasibility study that takes into account all the financial risks, capacity planning and resource management constraints.

Doing this will guarantee your project intake process prioritizes the best projects while also considering what is feasible considering the available resources of your organization.

5. Execute and Manage your Project Portfolio

Now you’ll need to coordinate the execution of the projects and programs in your portfolio simultaneously by working with project and program managers.

Related: Free Multiple Project Tracking Template for Excel

Project portfolio managers oversee the management of the project portfolio which includes approving or rejecting project and program ideas. They are responsible for getting a return on investment and meeting the goals and objectives of their organization. The project portfolio manager can be tasked with managing one or more portfolios.

The job is done by working with various portfolio management tools, financial algorithms and models to help the project portfolio manager align the projects to strategic goals of the organization. They are further guided by a set of valuation criteria and standards that help them through the portfolio management process.

Project portfolio managers are often involved with the PMO , which also sets the processes and standards for the portfolio. The project portfolio manager and PMO can also provide direction on what project management methodologies are used, whether traditional waterfall or an agile framework, when managing the project.

Project portfolio management requires a balance of resources, time, skills, budgets, risk mitigation and running the projects in the portfolio frugally and expediently without sacrificing quality. Managers do this through the use of five key project management processes.

• Change Management : Identifying and prioritizing change requests. These can be feature requests, business strategy, regulatory requirements, etc., based on business strategy, capacity planning, demand, financial and operational constraints.
• Risk Management : Identifying risks in projects that make up the portfolio, and developing a risk management plan to mitigate uncertainty within the project portfolio.
• Financial Management: Managing financial resources related to the projects in the portfolio and demonstrating financial results of the portfolio in relation to the organization’s business goals and strategic objectives.
• Pipeline Management: Ensuring project proposals are in the pipeline and using valuation criteria to determine if they’re worth executing.
• Resource Management : Efficiently and effectively using an organization’s limited resources, from materials and equipment to people and financial resources.

Project portfolio management software is a tool that’s designed to centralize the management and maintenance of a project management portfolio. With the increasingly large amount of data now associated with a single project, let alone a portfolio, the use of portfolio management software has become a necessity for project managers.

Portfolio managers and project management offices (PMOs) use portfolio management software to gather data, analyze information and use the results to better manage the portfolio and achieve the goals of their organization. Typical PPM software offerings are also used for portfolio optimization to better achieve the financial goals of the organization. Managers or PMOs use portfolio management software to find complementary processes, methods and technologies that will help each project succeed and the portfolio flourish. Microsoft Project is one of the most commonly used project management software, but it has major drawbacks that make ProjectManager a better choice for project management, program management and portfolio management.

Desktop vs. Online Project Portfolio Management Software

Managing a portfolio is like keeping many plates spinning at once. To keep up, you need robust project portfolio management software. The question is, what kind should you go for?

In terms of features, desktop and online software applications, at this point, are on an even playing field. It depends on the product, of course; but for the most part, both offer similar PPM tools. The major differences are price, security and speed. For example, desktop portfolio management software tends to cost more and require a license for each team member to use. This can add up.

Pros of Desktop PPM Software

Security on a desktop, even one linked to an office intranet, is likely better than many online services. Performance for a cloud-based software depends on your internet connection, and if your service goes out you’re out of luck. This, obviously, is not a concern for desktop apps.

Pros of Cloud-Based PPM Software

Online apps are monopolizing the project management sector, and for good reason; they excel at connectivity, collaboration and real-time data. So long as your team has an internet connection, they can use the tool—no matter where they are. This creates a platform where even distributed teams can work together anywhere and at any time. As teams update their status, you get live data that is more accurate and timely to help make effective decisions.

See All Your Projects Together

A Gantt chart is a visual tool that helps plan and schedule a project, but it can also be used as a roadmap to view all the projects in your portfolio on a single timeline. This helps managers find synergy between projects and work to make the portfolio more effective and efficient.

Get Live Data Across Portfolio

Being able to monitor your project portfolio is key to keeping it on track. A portfolio dashboard collects information on all your projects, calculates that data and then displays it in easy-to-read graphs and charts that can be read at a glance.

Use Detailed Data to Make Better Decisions

Better data leads to better strategies when managing your portfolio. Managers need a tool that can mine information from their project portfolio and present them with detailed reports. Being able to share and filter those reports to target the information your stakeholders want to see is also key.

Keep Team’s Tasks Balanced

Project portfolios work at the task level. To get the level of performance you need, your teams have to have the right number of tasks. Balancing their workload keeps your portfolio progressing as planned, so you need a portfolio tool with a feature to track who’s working on what.

Easy Change of Assignments

If you’re using the roadmap or dashboard, and see that there’s a need to reassign a task, the last thing you want is to have to go into another application to adjust a project in your portfolio. With a task management feature, you can stay in one tool.

View Your Portfolio in Real Time

The sooner you know something, the faster you can act. This can make the difference between taking advantage of an opportunity and missing a deadline. With online portfolio management software, you see what’s happening as it happens and can respond quickly to take advantage.

Projects are hard enough to manage, and a portfolio of them even more so. It’s many times more complex and requires robust project portfolio software. In this section, we will use ProjectManager as an example on how to use portfolio management software. If you want to follow along, then sign up for a free 30-day trial of ProjectManager. Once you’ve got our PPM software up and running, follow these steps.

1. Set Goals & Objectives

Having goals and objectives for your project portfolio is important, as it gives portfolio managers a target to hit when trying to increase their return on investment and keep risk at bay.

Start by writing down the goals and objectives for each project in your portfolio. There will likely be a number of detailed project management documents describing these projects. Attach them to our portfolio management software, which has unlimited file storage.

2. Group Related Projects

Grouping projects in a portfolio and creating reports around them collectively, rather than individually, gives portfolio managers the data they need to make better business decisions about costs, resources and more.

Keep all the projects in your portfolio together in our overview section. Compare status, budget and more of everything in your portfolio, all in one place. Now you can use resource allocation to boost one of the projects that might be underperforming.

3. Create Milestones

Milestones mark the end of one major phase and the beginning of another. They can be easily inserted on the Gantt chart, where they’re represented by a diamond symbol.

Set milestones and break up your projects into more manageable parts. This boosts the team’s morale by giving them a series of successes as they work through their tasks. Managers can use milestones as a means to measure progress.

4. Set Dependencies

Tasks are not all the same. Some can’t start until another has finished, or must start or finish at the same time as another. It’s important to know which of your tasks are dependent to keep the portfolio healthy.

Link dependent tasks by dragging one to the other to avoid blocking teams. This prevents these dependent tasks from falling through the cracks during the execution of the project. Once you have set dependencies, you can filter by critical path .

5. View Roadmap

When managing a portfolio, it’s important to keep the big picture in sight. Without it you can easily get lost in the weeds and fall behind schedule.

Keep goal-minded with the roadmap tool, which places all the projects in your portfolio on one Gantt chart. See every project on a timeline and quickly discern if there are any conflicts and resolve them before they interfere with the goals and objectives of your organization.

6. Balance Resources

Workload represents what your team has been assigned, in terms of their tasks. If you overburden one team member, they’ll not be as productive and morale will suffer.

See the planned effort for every team member working across your portfolio in a color-coded chart that shows who has too many hours assigned and who has too few. Then you can reallocate their hours right from the same page, improving efficiencies.

7. Track Portfolio Progress

A dashboard is a tool that graphically depicts various project metrics, so you can see how your project is performing. It’s a high-level view that can alert you of issues to address before they become problems.

Use our cloud-based dashboard to see your portfolio’s progress in real time. Mini-dashboards appear for each project that offer important metrics such as progress, budget and costs. You can also customize the dashboard to show only certain projects, and you can create reports based on projects that are filtered in this manner.

8. Analyze & Present Reports

Status reports are a way to measure the current state of your project. They communicate important data to stakeholders, keeping them updated. They also maximize portfolio performance.

Use the built-in reporting tool for a deep dive into project data to see progress and measure performance. A portfolio status report is perfect for stakeholder presentations. If they have questions, the status report can be filtered to bring up just the information they’re interested in.

9. Collaborate with Stakeholders

Collaboration means working together to increase productivity. This can be at the task level for teams, or on an executive level. Ideally, it’s practiced throughout every department in an organization.

Project portfolio managers have the tools they need to stay in touch with every project manager leading a project in your portfolio. Get in touch with anyone by tagging them in a comment. They’ll get an email notification. Alerts can be customized, so your inbox doesn’t get cluttered.

Project Portfolio Management Tools

With software moving from the desktop to the cloud, project portfolio management grew more efficient and effective. Some of the features that serve portfolio managers are the following:

• Online Gantt Charts
• Real-Time Dashboards
• Shared Calendars
• Time Tracking and Timesheets
• Project Groups
• Dynamic Reporting
• Collaborate with Remote Teams
• Resource Management

The following is a hierarchical listing of the team members involved in managing and executing a project portfolio.

• Board Member: Members of the board are responsible for governing an organization and bear the legal responsibility for the organization. Their skills and experience help guide the organization to achieve its vision.
• Project Portfolio Manager: This individual manages the plans, development and implementation of the portfolio, keeping in mind best practices to make sure that the portfolio is performing as expected and right what is preventing that.
• Program Manager: Programs differ from portfolios in that all the projects collected under it are related. Therefore the program manager’s role is similar to that of the portfolio manager, coordinating the projects in the program to work together to achieve their shared objective.
• Project Sponsor: This position is usually held by a manager or an executive who is tasked with being accountable for the project. They are the hub that connects the project to the business and those responsible for making large strategic decisions for the organization.
• Project Owner: This person is the one who is usually working with the sponsor and is responsible for the project’s implementation. Therefore, they usually come from the business unit that is getting the final deliverable for the project.
• Project Manager: They are responsible for the planning, scheduling, monitoring and reporting of a project. They also assemble and lead a team hired to execute the plan. They build the budget, manage resources, etc.
• Project Coordinator: Working under the project manager, they take smaller tasks off the project manager’s desk to free them up for larger managerial responsibilities. Mostly, this means that the project coordinator is handling administrative duties.
• Team Member: Hired because of skills and experience related to the project, these individuals are assigned tasks and oversee their completion. They meet regularly with the project coordinator or project manager, to whom they update their status.

Any industry that is working on multiple projects at the same time benefits from the discipline of project portfolio management. Obviously, that’s a lot of industries and organizations.

Some of the industries and organizations that are reaping the rewards from using project portfolio management include:

• Computer software
• Hospitals and healthcare
• Construction, automotive
• Financial services and banking
• Service and staffing recruiting
• Telecommunications
• Government administration

The following is a mini-glossary of project portfolio terms that have been used in this guide.

• Portfolio Management: Controlling a portfolio of projects to make sure they align with the overall strategic goals and objectives of an organization.
• Program Management: Managing a portfolio of projects with the same aim as portfolio management, only the projects in the portfolio are all similar or related.
• Project Management: Planning, executing, monitoring and reporting on one project, from start to finish, including controlling scope, costs and schedule.
• Project Management Office (PMO): Group within an organization that’s tasked with maintaining standards for project management within that organization, often oversells portfolio and program management.
• Change Control Management: Process to identify and successfully respond to change in a project or portfolio.
• Portfolio Reporting: Creating charts, graphs and other reporting documentation to communicate progress and other portfolio metrics.
• Risk Management: Identifying and resolving risk before it happens and after.
• Resource Management: The process of allocating resources throughout the life cycle of the portfolio.
• Pipeline Management: Making decisions for estimating and selecting which projects to fund that align with an organization’s strategy.
• Financial Management: Understanding each project’s unique risk and using this knowledge to make decisions across the entire portfolio.

All these factors and more make it clear that project portfolio management is a methodology that can serve any organization with a portfolio of projects. And, with ProjectManager , you have the best PPM tool in the market to fully take advantage of all these business benefits.

Sign up for your free 30-day trial and start managing your portfolios better.

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Project Portfolio Management Resources

• Project Closure Template
• RACI Matrix Template
• Communications Plan Template
• Best Project Portfolio Management Rankings
• Project Management Trends (2022)
• 5 Benefits in Adopting PPM (Project Portfolio Management)
• What do Portfolio Managers do?

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• Project management |

Project portfolio management 101

Project portfolio management helps you organize data and highlight crucial information during project life cycles inside each portfolio, which saves time and increases efficiency. In this article, learn how you and top-level executives can get a bird’s-eye view of all your business project life cycles and remove barriers to high-level performance.

If you manage various initiatives across different teams and departments, you know how hard capturing and sharing results can be. 

Project management tools offer a way to organize and execute work for one initiative, but you need project portfolio management to gain clarity across teams and departments.

Your team needs structure, and your stakeholders need to see results. Project portfolio management is the brain of the operation. This organizational model helps you organize data and highlight important details during project life cycles within an entire portfolio of projects.

What is project portfolio management (PPM)?

Project portfolio management (PPM) is the centralized management of multiple projects. With project portfolio management, you gain visibility across projects and initiatives to connect your team’s daily to-dos with your company’s organizational strategy. 

In other words, it’s a method to “bridge the gap between strategy and implementation,” according to the Project Management Institute (PMI).

The value of PPM lies in uncovering and prioritizing projects that offer the best return on investment. Then, follow up by implementing the resources necessary to take them on.

How does project portfolio management work?

Once the project selection process has concluded, the project portfolio management (PPM) group actively monitors the entire portfolio of projects to ensure alignment with the organizational goals. In larger organizations, this strategic alignment is often coordinated through a project management office (PMO) or an enterprise PMO for organizations with multiple PMOs assigned to separate projects.

Poorly performing projects require immediate attention as they can negatively impact the performance of other initiatives within the portfolio of projects. Here, the PPM group, or PMO, is tasked with assessing each project's feasibility and making tough choices about the best project to advance or pause. These decision-makers are responsible for maintaining a balance between individual project success and the collective health of the entire portfolio, making sure each contributes positively and maximizes business value.

Project portfolio management vs. project management

Both project management and portfolio management are subsets of work management , which is a systematic approach to coordinating work throughout your organization—from projects and ongoing processes to routine tasks—to drive clarity.

Project management is ideal for:

Planning, managing, and executing one specific initiative

Team collaboration for one project

Assigning roles and responsibilities for the project team

Task management

Project portfolio management is great for:

Managing multiple projects and large-scale initiatives

Coordinating across cross-functional teams

Assessing the best projects for your organization and resources

Organizing, forecasting, and tracking your team’s priorities

Easily visualizing progress across initiatives for executive stakeholders

Clearly defining and connecting daily work to strategic planning objectives

Staying on top of business goals

Risk management and mitigation

Why is project portfolio management important?

Project portfolio management acts as a gatekeeper between your team’s time and the influx of potential projects. The goal is to assess which projects will generate the highest return on investment and which are aligned with organizational goals. 

Without the oversight of project portfolio management, your team may take on too many projects simultaneously. This can result from improper resource allocation or a disorganized project manager, leading to bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the system, which is a clear indication of poor portfolio management. 

Instead, think of PPM as your personal mission control dashboard. It keeps everything accessible, so the quality of work stays high and each team can hit their goals.

In short, project portfolio management keeps your business agile.

What industries benefit from project portfolio management?

Project portfolio management frees up time and streamlines efficiency across teams. When your company manages different projects simultaneously, staying organized is non-negotiable. Project portfolio management is not geared toward any specific industry—if your company handles a portfolio of projects, your team will benefit from PPM.

Popular industries that benefit from good project portfolio management include:

Information technology

IT teams often have large budgets with smaller teams. Keeping an eye on your team’s workflow prevents errors and over-utilization. Keep tasks on time and use data to drive profitability.

Marketing teams often need their attention on many moving pieces. From e-commerce to websites, there is a lot to keep track of. Keeping the pulse on the company’s objectives as a whole rather than one piece of the puzzle makes project portfolio management ideal.

Construction

Project portfolio management is incredibly beneficial in the construction industry, especially in meeting regulatory requirements and executing the strategic planning of resources and timelines. Every phase of a construction project demands careful sequencing and adaptation to changes throughout the project life cycle. Project portfolio management supports the team while keeping an eye on the whole picture.

Financial services

Precision is the cornerstone of the financial services industry. There is no room for error between banks, credit unions, and credit card companies. Adapting and utilizing project portfolio management ensures that quotas are met, documents are accounted for, and teams are equipped with the tools necessary to get the job done right.

Portfolio manager responsibilities—and other PPM roles

Just like project management, there are some key PPM roles and responsibilities. With these roles, you can ensure everyone understands their responsibilities within the project team and every other team member. 

The project portfolio manager

As you might expect, the project portfolio manager is the person creating and managing the project portfolio. 

As the project portfolio manager, you may not be the project manager for the entire portfolio of projects, but it’s your job to ensure the projects within your portfolio are up-to-date and have relevant recent status updates. You are responsible for keeping tabs on each project life cycle and providing support where needed. Plan to check in frequently with individual project managers to develop a cadence for project status reporting .

The executive stakeholders

Executive stakeholders are any team members or company executives who need a high-level view of what’s happening across the portfolio’s initiatives. For example, if you’re managing a team within the marketing department, the CMO, or head of marketing, might be an executive stakeholder in your portfolio.

The program manager

A program manager has a similar role to a project portfolio manager. The main difference between the two roles and management techniques is that a program manager is in charge of related projects, while a project portfolio manager might not be. 

For example, a program manager might manage multiple projects related to a specific product marketing launch. In contrast, a project portfolio manager would manage multiple projects within the marketing department, which might not be directly connected.

The project manager

Yes, there are still project managers in project portfolio management! Project managers can own individual projects within the larger portfolio. The project portfolio manager may also own and manage some projects, depending on the size and scope of the portfolio.

The project team members

Everyone working on the projects in the portfolio is part of the project team . Your project team may be a cross-functional group of members from various departments within your company, or they could be traditional team members. The main difference between a “project team” and a “team” is that a project team is a group that works together for the duration of a project before disbanding.

The benefits of project portfolio management

Project portfolio management is part of a larger system of work: work management . When used correctly, PPM helps you and relevant decision makers get a bird’s-eye view to make better strategic planning decisions. Teams that use project portfolio management software benefit from:

Increased visibility

Added strategic alignment

High-level, holistic planning and forecasting

At-a-glance insights

More time for creative and strategic work

Real-time project progress

Quicker decision-making

Project data automation

Gain clear reasoning for project methodology

Project portfolio management software

To get the best results from project portfolio management software , you need a tool that keeps your strategy and daily to-dos connected, provides a quick overview, and updates in real-time. 

There are three must-have project portfolio management software features:

1. Real-time project status updates

One principal value of project portfolio management is the ability to get an overview of the progress of every project within the portfolio. To do so, ensure your project portfolio management tool offers reporting features at both the project and portfolio levels. That way, executive stakeholders can get at-a-glance insight at the portfolio level, then drill down into any project-specific status updates where necessary.

2. Timeline and dependency tracking

Because a portfolio consists of many complex projects, make sure your project portfolio management software offers a way to view the timeline of each. You should be able to view any dependencies and adjust if something is off. With a Gantt chart-like view , you can identify key milestones and dates for every project and ensure things are moving smoothly.

3. Workload management

Workload management can help you develop and track your resource management plan . With workload management tools , you clearly understand your project team's responsibilities and deliverables across all of the projects within the portfolio. 

If you need to change or optimize your resource management plan, you can visualize who has the bandwidth and who is close to burnout on the team.

Best project portfolio management practices

Project portfolio management works best when you maintain an updated, real-time portfolio. As the project portfolio manager, it’s your job to check in with the individual project managers regularly and confirm their projects’ data is accurate. That way, you and any executive stakeholders can identify any at-risk or off-track projects and course-correct while ensuring on-track projects are accurately aligned with your company’s strategic objectives.

Project portfolio management processes

Many moving pieces go into the project portfolio management process. It is a continuous effort that requires careful planning to identify, track, and manage projects. The focus is to always deliver high-quality projects that are aligned with business objectives. To get started with PPM, follow these five steps:

Step 1: Align your portfolio to business objectives

PPM can help you connect daily work to strategic objectives—but for you to do that most effectively, you need to know what strategic objectives you’re connecting to. 

If your company sets yearly or quarterly goals, you may have various objectives ranging from revenue goals to churn reduction targets. Clarify which strategic goals, or OKRs , your portfolio is contributing to and how.

Key takeaway: Determine how your project portfolio will support specific company goals.

Step 2: Add projects

Your portfolio should include all relevant projects. Make sure you add the right projects and prioritize them in order of importance, if applicable. As the project portfolio manager, take some time to connect with the individual project managers to align on how each project in the portfolio connects to your strategic goals. Finally, confirm that there are no related projects that you haven’t included in your portfolio.

Key takeaway: Organize your portfolio by adding projects important to your overall business strategy. Communicate with project managers and explain how their projects contribute to the overall plan.

Step 3: Share your portfolio with executive stakeholders

A portfolio is a tool to help you align with your project managers and better prioritize project work. It also provides executive stakeholders with a dashboard of all initiatives across your department. Make sure they have easy access to your PPM software. When executives get real-time insight into project progress, they’re empowered to make better decisions.

Key takeaway: Keep stakeholders informed by sharing an overview of initiatives.

Step 4: Get real-time project updates

Make sure your project managers regularly update their individual projects. That way, your portfolio becomes your team’s mission control for all initiatives. You can see these in one place to better visualize dependencies, identify new project opportunities, and help projects at risk.

Key takeaway: Keep your team accountable for updating projects regularly, so your overview accurately represents project workflows.

Step 5: Use your portfolio for resource management

In addition to helping you and key stakeholders stay up-to-date on project progress, a portfolio is a powerful tool for resource management.

During the project planning stage of each project, you’ll likely have created a resource management plan . But if you see a project falling off track in your portfolio overview, you can redistribute available resources across projects to address that issue.

Ensure your PPM software offers workload management tools to increase resource allocation and redistribution visibility.

Key takeaway: Use project portfolio management software that monitors project timelines and dependencies . This allows you to prioritize and allocate resources effectively. 

The best tools for project portfolio management

Project portfolio management is a vital component of business planning that enables project managers to estimate a project's potential revenue before it even begins. Before making any pivotal decisions, businesses may put the pieces of a project together with the help of a PPM tool. 

Here are a few of the best:

Decision tree analysis

A decision tree is a flowchart that begins with a single central concept and branches out according to the outcomes of potential choices. The model often resembles a tree with branches, hence the term "decision tree."

These trees are employed in decision tree analysis, illustrating a difficult decision's probable results, expenses, and effects.

Cost-benefit analysis

A cost-benefit analysis enables you to assess the financial benefits of a choice, so you can evaluate whether it is worthwhile to proceed with it. It's a helpful tool when you want to prevent bias in your decision-making process, particularly when you have to make a significant choice that will affect the success of your team or project.

Priority matrix

A priority matrix classifies tasks or projects according to criteria, such as effort and urgency, and allows team members to rapidly decide what to tackle first. It takes the guesswork out of where energy should be allocated and prevents important tasks from slipping through the cracks.

See the big picture with project portfolio management

PPM is the best way to collaborate with and across your team. Get a bird’s-eye view of all your initiatives in one place to track the right metrics in the right place.

Ready to try project portfolio management? Learn more about Asana Portfolios to help you effortlessly connect all of your initiatives in one place.

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How to manage a project portfolio

table of contents

Managing a project portfolio: strategies for success.

Project portfolio management (PPM) can make or break a company's strategic success. It's an area that requires precision, insight, and careful coordination. This article aims to provide a quick guide on managing a project portfolio, covering everything from the basics to advanced strategies. Read on to uncover the keys to effective portfolio management that can drive business growth across industries.

Understanding Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

At its core, Project Portfolio Management is the centralized management of one or more project portfolios to achieve strategic objectives. It involves selecting, prioritizing, and controlling an organization's projects and programs in alignment with its strategic goals and capacity to deliver.

The primary goals of PPM are to improve decision-making, allocate resources more effectively, align activities with strategy, and ensure that projects meet their expected benefits. It's important to distinguish PPM from project management. While project management focuses on executing individual projects successfully, PPM takes a broader view, overseeing all projects in the portfolio to ensure strategic alignment and maximum return on investment.

The role of a portfolio manager

The portfolio manager is a key figure in project portfolio management (PPM). They oversee the entire project portfolio, ensuring it aligns with the organization's strategic goals and delivers value. The portfolio manager's role is multi-faceted, encompassing everything from strategy to execution. Below are the key responsibilities that fall under their purview:

Strategic planning

Developing the strategic plan for the project portfolio, aligning it with the organization's overall business objectives.

Participating in strategic decision-making to ensure projects contribute towards achieving business goals.

Project selection and prioritization

Developing criteria for selecting and prioritizing projects, ensuring alignment with business objectives.

Overseeing the selection process, ensuring that only projects that add value and align with strategy are included in the portfolio.

Resource allocation

Ensuring resources are allocated effectively across the portfolio based on project priorities and strategic alignment.

Monitoring resource utilization to avoid over-allocation or under-utilization.

Risk management

Identifying and assessing risks at the portfolio level and developing strategies to mitigate these risks.

Monitoring risks throughout project execution and adapting strategies as necessary.

Performance monitoring

Setting up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for the portfolio and tracking performance against these measures.

Making adjustments to the portfolio as necessary based on performance monitoring.

Communication and reporting

Facilitating communication among project teams, senior management, and other stakeholders.

Preparing and presenting portfolio performance reports to senior management and other stakeholders.

Leadership and team management

Providing guidance and direction to project teams, fostering a collaborative and productive work environment.

Resolving conflicts and addressing issues that may arise among project teams.

Continual learning and adaptivity

Staying updated with industry trends and project management methodologies, and tools advancements.

Continually improving the portfolio management process based on lessons learned and changes in the business environment.

A portfolio manager must wear many hats and be equipped with a wide range of skills, including strategic thinking, leadership, communication, and decision-making. By carrying out these responsibilities effectively, they can help the organization achieve its strategic objectives and enhance its competitive advantage.

Establishing a Portfolio Management Framework

A comprehensive project portfolio management (PPM) framework establishes the ground rules for how the organization will manage its portfolio of projects. The roadmap guides the portfolio management process, from project selection to execution and review. Developing such a framework is complex, requiring strategic thinking, foresight, and a deep understanding of the organization's capabilities and objectives.

Here's a step-by-step guide to help you establish an effective portfolio management framework.

Step 1: Define your strategic objectives

The first step in creating a portfolio management framework is clearly defining your organization's strategic objectives. The purpose of the portfolio is to help the organization achieve these objectives. Your objectives might relate to revenue growth, cost reduction, market expansion, innovation, risk reduction, or other aspects of business performance. They should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Step 2: Establish governance structures and processes

Once you have defined your strategic objectives, you must establish the governance structures and processes to guide portfolio management. This includes defining roles and responsibilities for portfolio management, setting up decision-making processes, and establishing mechanisms for oversight and control.

A governance body or committee is often set up to oversee the portfolio management process. This body typically includes senior executives and other key stakeholders and is responsible for making strategic decisions about the portfolio, such as project approval and prioritization, resource allocation, and risk management.

Step 3: Develop project selection and prioritization criteria

The next step is to develop criteria for project selection and prioritization. These criteria should align with your strategic objectives and can include factors like expected benefits, costs, risks, strategic fit, and resource requirements.

Prioritization is a critical aspect of portfolio management. Not all projects can be pursued at once due to limited resources and other constraints. Hence, a systematic approach is needed to rank projects based on their strategic importance and potential return on investment.

Step 4: Set up portfolio performance measures

To monitor and control the performance of your portfolio, you need to set up performance measures. These are typically expressed as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and might include measures like return on investment, strategic alignment, project success rate, and resource utilization.

These measures provide a basis for portfolio review and adjustment. They help you track whether your portfolio is delivering the expected benefits and identify areas for improvement.

Step 5: Implement a portfolio review and adjustment process

The final step in establishing a portfolio management framework is implementing a portfolio review and adjustment process. This process should be conducted regularly, such as on a quarterly or annual basis, and involve a comprehensive review of the portfolio's performance against its strategic objectives and KPIs.

The review process should also include a mechanism for adjusting the portfolio as needed. This could involve adding new projects, terminating underperforming projects, or reallocating resources among projects.

Step 6: Documentation and communication

Once the portfolio management framework has been established, it should be documented and communicated to all relevant stakeholders. This includes project teams, senior executives, and other parties involved in the portfolio management process. Clear communication helps ensure everyone understands how the portfolio is managed and what their roles and responsibilities are.

Creating a robust project portfolio management framework may seem like a daunting task. But with careful planning, clear strategic objectives, and a systematic approach, it can be an instrumental tool in driving your organization's strategic success. Remember that this framework isn't set in stone - it should be flexible and adaptable, capable of evolving with your organization's needs and the ever-changing business environment.

Selecting the right projects

The selection of the right projects is fundamental to PPM. Portfolio managers should consider various factors, including project objectives, expected benefits, risks, resource requirements, and strategic alignment.

Project risk assessment should be incorporated into the selection process to understand potential uncertainties and their impact on project outcomes. Moreover, the portfolio should be balanced with a mix of projects. This includes different types of projects (e.g., innovative, growth, efficiency), projects at different stages, and projects of different sizes and risk profiles.

Portfolio monitoring and control

Active portfolio monitoring and control are necessary to ensure projects remain aligned with strategy and progress toward their goals. Regular portfolio reviews provide opportunities to adjust and realign the portfolio based on changes in the organization's strategy, environment, and resource capacity.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are used in portfolio management to monitor the performance of projects and the portfolio as a whole. Common KPIs include project health, strategic alignment, return on investment, and resource utilization.

Managing portfolio risks involves the identification, assessment, and control of uncertainties that could negatively impact portfolio performance. This requires an integrated approach that combines project-level risk management with portfolio-level risk management.

Challenges in Project Portfolio Management

Despite its strategic importance, portfolio management is often fraught with challenges. These range from insufficient resources, conflicting priorities, and lack of executive support to resistance to change and inadequate communication. To overcome these obstacles, organizations need to foster a supportive culture, provide appropriate training, establish clear processes, and encourage open communication.

The Future of Project Portfolio Management

The field of PPM is continually evolving, driven by advancements in technology and changing business environments. Emerging trends include the increasing use of AI and machine learning for project selection and performance prediction, integrating sustainability considerations into portfolio decisions, and the growing importance of agility and flexibility in portfolio management.

To stay ahead of these changes, portfolio managers must keep abreast of new developments, continually update their skills, and be ready to adapt their practices as required.

Managing a project portfolio effectively is a complex but crucial task. By understanding the principles of PPM, selecting the right projects, monitoring progress and performance, leveraging appropriate tools, and staying ahead of future trends, organizations can ensure their project portfolios drive strategic success. The journey of portfolio management is one of continuous learning and adaptation, but the rewards in terms of strategic alignment and value delivery are well worth the effort.

How to create a roadmap for a project

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How to Manage Your Project Portfolio Like a Pro

If you are a project manager you know how challenging it can be to juggle multiple projects at the same time. You have to balance competing priorities, allocate resources, monitor progress, and deliver results. How can you do all that without losing your sanity?

The answer is project portfolio management. In this blog post, we will explain what project portfolio management is, why it is important, and how you can use Crealately to manage your project portfolio effectively.

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What is a Project Portfolio?

A project portfolio is a collection of projects that are aligned with the strategic goals and objectives of an organization. A project portfolio can include projects of different types, sizes, scopes, and complexities. For example, a project portfolio can consist of:

Ongoing projects that deliver value to the customers and stakeholders.

New projects that explore new opportunities or address emerging needs.

Improvement projects that enhance the quality or efficiency of existing processes or products.

Innovation projects that create new products or services or disrupt the market.

A project portfolio is not just a list of projects. It is a dynamic and evolving entity that reflects the changing needs and priorities of the organization. Therefore, a project portfolio needs to be managed carefully and continuously.

Learn more about setting up a ipeline for better project portfolio management.

What is Project Portfolio Management?

Project portfolio management is the process of selecting, prioritizing, and managing multiple projects within an organization. It involves aligning the projects with the strategic goals, resources, and risks of the organization. Project portfolio management helps to ensure that the projects are delivering value, meeting deadlines, and staying within budget. It also helps to balance the workload and optimize the use of resources across the projects.

Managing a project portfolio goes beyond merely managing projects, it requires a holistic view of the organization’s vision, mission, and objectives, as well as the interdependencies and trade-offs among the projects. It is a dynamic and iterative process that requires constant monitoring, evaluation, and adjustment of the portfolio based on changing needs and circumstances.

Also read about how to better manage your projects with Kanban boards.

Project Portfolio Management Process

Portfolio management is the process of selecting, prioritizing, executing, and evaluating the projects in a portfolio. Portfolio management involves four main steps:

1. Planning

This step involves defining the strategic goals and objectives of the organization, identifying the potential projects that can contribute to those goals, and assessing the feasibility, risks, benefits, and costs of each project.

2. Selection

Choose the best mix of projects that can maximize the value and alignment of the portfolio. This may involve using various criteria, such as strategic fit, return on investment, resource availability, risk appetite, etc.

3. Execution

Allocate resources, assign roles and responsibilities, set milestones and deliverables, and monitor and control the performance of the projects in the portfolio.

4. Evaluation

This step involves measuring the outcomes and impacts of the projects in the portfolio, comparing them with the expected results and benefits, and identifying the lessons learned and best practices for future improvement.

Why is Project Portfolio Management Important

Aligning the projects with the strategic vision and mission of the organization. Portfolio management ensures that the projects are relevant, meaningful and aligned with the organizational goals and values. This way, the projects can contribute to the long-term success and sustainability of the organization.

Optimizing the use of resources and avoiding wastage or duplication. Well managed project portfolios help organizations to achieve more with less. It assists in effective resource allocation depending on the feasibility of the project. It also eliminates or reduces the projects that are redundant, low-priority or low-performing. This way, the organization can save time, money and effort, and increase its productivity and profitability.

Managing dependencies and interdependencies among the projects. Portfolio management helps the organization to coordinate and integrate its activities and deliverables across different projects. It helps to identify and resolve potential issues and risks that may arise from the interactions and overlaps among projects. It also helps to leverage synergies and opportunities that may emerge from the collaboration and integration among the projects. This way, organizations can enhance its performance and quality, and deliver greater value to its customers and stakeholders.

Balancing risk and reward across the portfolio. Portfolio management helps to assess and prioritize the projects based on their expected costs, benefits, risks and returns. It also helps to monitor and control the performance and outcomes of the projects, and to adjust or change them as needed. This way, the organization can manage its uncertainties and contingencies, and maximize its returns on investment.

Enhancing communication and collaboration among the stakeholders . Communication is optimized with efficient portfolio management. Teams can communicate clearly and consistently the vision, objectives, expectations and progress of the projects to all the stakeholders. It also helps to solicit feedback, input and support from the stakeholders, and to address their needs, concerns and issues.

Best Practices in Portfolio Management

Define clear and measurable goals and objectives. Determine what you want to achieve, why, and how you will measure your progress and success.

Implement a transparent and consistent process to prioritize projects. Establish a clear criteria and guidelines that are aligned with your goals and objectives, and that are communicated and followed by everyone involved.

Use data-driven tools and techniques to analyze and compare projects. Collect relevant and reliable data on each project’s costs, benefits, risks, and impacts, and use appropriate methods and tools to evaluate and rank them.

Involve relevant stakeholders in decision-making and feedback. Identify who they are, what their interests and expectations are, and how you will engage them throughout the portfolio lifecycle.

Communicate regularly and clearly with all parties involved. You need to have a communication plan that specifies what, when, how, and with whom you will share information and updates on your portfolio.

Be adaptable to changing circumstances. Monitor the internal and external factors that may affect your portfolio’s performance and alignment with your goals and objectives, and make timely and informed decisions to modify or terminate projects as needed.

Review your portfolio periodically and celebrate achievements. Have a review plan that defines how often, how, and by whom you will evaluate your portfolio’s outcomes and impacts, and how you will recognize and reward your team’s efforts.

Common Challenges in Project Portfolio Management

Dealing with uncertainty and complexity in the external and internal environment.

Managing conflicting interests and expectations among different stakeholders.

Balancing short-term and long-term goals and outcomes.

Resolving trade-offs and compromises among competing criteria.

Handling resource constraints and bottlenecks.

Coping with change resistance and cultural barriers.

Why You Need a Portfolio Management Platform

To overcome these challenges and streamline your portfolio management process, you need a powerful and user-friendly platform that can help you:

Plan your portfolio strategically and align it with your organizational goals.

Select your projects objectively and prioritize them based on value and impact.

Execute your projects efficiently and effectively using agile methodologies.

Evaluate your projects accurately and comprehensively using real-time data.

Collaborate with your team members and stakeholders seamlessly using cloud-based technology.

How Can You Manage Your Project Portfolio with Creately

Create your own custom portfolio dashboard that shows you the status, progress, health, and performance of your projects at a glance.

Use drag-and-drop functionality to organize your projects into different categories, such as type, phase, priority, etc.

Apply filters and sorting options to view your projects based on various criteria, such as budget, schedule, scope, quality, risk, etc.

Use interactive charts and graphs to visualize your data and insights in an engaging way.

Integrate with other tools and platforms that you use, such as Google Workspaces, Microsoft Teams and Slack.

Wrapping Up

Project portfolio management is a vital skill for any project manager who wants to deliver value and excellence to their organization. By using Crealately, you can simplify and enhance your portfolio management process and achieve your goals faster and better.

If you want to learn more about how Crealately can help you with project portfolio management, sign up for a free trial today and see for yourself.

Join over thousands of organizations that use Creately to brainstorm, plan, analyze, and execute their projects successfully.

FAQs About Project Portfolio Management

There are different ways to measure the success of your portfolio, depending on your goals and objectives. Some common metrics include:

Value: The extent to which your portfolio delivers benefits and outcomes that meet or exceed the expectations of your customers and stakeholders.

Alignment: The degree to which your portfolio supports and contributes to the strategic vision and mission of your organization.

Performance: The level of quality and efficiency that your portfolio achieves in terms of budget, schedule, scope, quality, risk, etc.

Impact: The magnitude and duration of the positive effects that your portfolio creates for your organization and society.

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Hansani has a background in journalism and marketing communications. She loves reading and writing about tech innovations. She enjoys writing poetry, travelling and photography.

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PPM 101 – Good Project Portfolio Governance Delivers Superior Results

Strong project portfolio governance is the number one success factor for making portfolio management successful. Unfortunately, most companies struggle with governance. In fact, when you hear the word ‘governance’, what comes to mind? Do you think of bureaucracy, lots of meetings with few or no decisions, unclear expectations, poor accountability, strife between decision makers, inconsistent decision making? These issues are really just the symptoms of poor governance. In this post, we are going to focus on what project portfolio governance is and why it is important and provide success factors to help your governance teams improve their governance processes.

“Effective IT governance is the single most important predictor of the value an organization generates from IT”¹

What is Project Portfolio Governance?

At its core, project portfolio governance is about strategic decision making. When we talk about project portfolio governance we are referring to the governance of all projects in the portfolio. The graphic below highlights that all four components of the portfolio management lifecycle depend on good project governance. From a portfolio management perspective many of the critical decisions involve project selection (Defining the Portfolio), prioritization and resource allocation ( Optimizing Portfolio Value ), project performance (Protect Portfolio Value) and realizing project benefits (Delivering Portfolio Value). Portfolio governance is the foundation of project portfolio management.

According to Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, experts in information technology governance, governance can be defined as “specifying the decision rights and accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior…”. Clearly, this refers to the people making decisions, a process for making decisions, and accountability to help ensure that good decisions are made.

“Portfolio management without governance is an empty concept” ²

In practice, the tension is about how to make project portfolio governance both effective and efficient. Project portfolio governance can be effective but requires a significant amount of time from project teams to collect data, the Portfolio Manager to create reports, and for the governance committee to sift through the reports and data to make better decisions. Project Management Offices (PMO’s) may also take a “lean” approach to project portfolio governance that is apparently efficient that requires little effort from the governance committee, but is inadequate or completely ineffective. Our goal is to balance effectiveness against efficiency to ensure that the portfolio is properly managed and delivering maximum value.

Why is Project Portfolio Governance Important?

Project portfolio governance is important because it is the foundation of all portfolio management activities. According to Howard A. Rubin, a former executive vice president at the Meta Group, “a good governance structure is central to making portfolio management work.” Hence, well-defined and properly structured governance is critical to manage the portfolio. Let’s define good portfolio governance as having the right people making good strategic decisions with the right information at the right time.

• The right people – having the right decision makers means having people at the right level of authority and breadth of knowledge to make decisions. Having the wrong people involved (or missing the right people) means that decision quality is compromised, a decision can’t be made or must be revisited later, or that a decision will be challenged. None of these are desirable outcomes and should be avoided. Empowering the right decision makers within the organization is very important. In addition, different levels of management may participate in different types of portfolio decision making. Identifying which people make certain decisions is part of having the right people for project portfolio governance.
• Good strategic decisions – the goal of portfolio management is to maximize organizational value, and good portfolio management by definition is about making trade-offs, which means not everything can get done. Good strategic decisions include “no” or “no, not right now”. Saying “no” is a critical success factor for project portfolio governance. If the governance committee approves most projects or makes everything a priority, portfolio value is diminished. It is also critical for the governance team to agree on HOW it will make decisions.
• The right information – even if the right decision makers are present and capable of making good portfolio decisions, having too much or too little information frustrates the decision-making process. Not only do decision makers need to know how to use portfolio data, but they need the right data, otherwise they will make sub-optimal portfolio decisions. Governance includes the processes for collecting quality data in a timely way.
• The right time –a governance team needs to meet on the right cadence to address portfolio matters. Project approvals, prioritization, status reviews, capacity planning, all need to be conducted on a consistent cadence. This doesn’t mean that all of these activities have the same cadence, only that they occur on a consistent basis to ensure the portfolio is properly managed.

“Good governance design allows enterprises to deliver superior results on their [project] investments.” ¹

The Portfolio Governance Team

Setting up a portfolio governance team is a critical first step in establishing portfolio governance. Until there is a governance team, there is no governance. The composition of the portfolio governance team is important as the effectiveness of portfolio governance and strategic decision making is directly correlated with the ability of the governance team to make decisions that carry weight and will be respected across the organization. Governance teams composed of junior leaders often need their decisions “blessed” by one or more senior leaders before they are really approved. This is considered weak governance.

Organizations that don’t take this serious will miss the mark on portfolio management – get the right leaders together who can effectively make serious strategic decisions for the organization. After all, we’re talking about making critical strategic decisions that impact the organization’s ability to accomplish strategic goals; it’s worth putting in some time and energy to make it work. Sadly, many organizations go through the motions of governance without ever really getting the benefit of portfolio management. Moreover, it’s easier for everyone to avoid contention by saying ‘yes’ to proposals rather than have a healthy debate over whether projects should be approved and how they should be prioritized.

Effective portfolio governance relies on an effective portfolio governance team. Simply bringing senior leaders together does not automatically constitute a team. The governance team should have limited membership but adequate representation of organizations impacted by projects in the portfolio. Each member should bring something unique to the team to add value to the governance team.

The Accountability Framework

In order to achieve support results on project investments, it is paramount that good strategic decisions are consistently made and then properly executed. In order to ensure that good decisions are made that maximize portfolio value and benefit the organization, accountability mechanisms need to be put in place. Accountability may also be synonymous with fair and equitable processes as well as transparency. ‘Accountability’ and ‘accountable’ have strong positive connotations; they hold promises of fair and equitable governance. It comes close to ‘responsiveness’ and ‘a sense of responsibility’, a willingness to act in a transparent, fair, and equitable way. Governance teams must then demonstrate their accountability for the appropriate, proper and intended use of resources. This is what project portfolio governance is about. Furthermore, it is good leadership that drives accountability. True leaders hold decision makers accountable for their decisions.

The diagram below captures the three elements of the accountability framework.

• Leadership to drive accountability
• Governance as the framework which enables accountability
• A shared vision with strategic goals to demonstrate accountability

The rest of this post will focus on the first two elements and will close with critical success factors for effective and efficient project portfolio governance.

Leadership Drives Project Portfolio Governance Accountability

Leadership is at the heart of governance for it is people who make decisions, but not all decision makers are leaders, and by extension, not everyone on a governance team is a leader. Yet, when the governance council has true leaders and this leadership team truly functions as a team, then strong portfolio management is finally possible.

Because many governance teams do struggle to provide leadership to the organizations they are serving, it is appropriate to bring up Patrick Lencioni’s model on the five dysfunctions of a team . The model is shown below with some brief commentary taken from his book, The Advantage ³.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team

• The absence of trust – “The only way for teams to build real trust is for team members to come clean about who they are, warts and all.” The absence of trust manifests itself in project portfolio governance when team members are afraid to share their points of view about projects. If most of the governance team wants to approve a project, but one person has a different point of view and simply goes along with the rest of the team and doesn’t share their thought, there is an absence of trust on the team. This leads to the second dysfunction.
• The fear of conflict – “When there is trust, conflict becomes nothing but the pursuit of the truth, an attempt to find the best possible answer”. I love Lencioni’s quote here because conflict is not directed toward other individuals but is for the purpose of finding the best possible answer. Portfolio management is a multi-faceted discipline and everyone on a governance team sees things with a different lens, which is why everyone’s input is necessary. Tragically, governance teams compromise decision quality for the sake of maintaining an artificial sense of harmony among the team. Some corporate cultures avoid conflict and pay a price for it or the governance team owner shies away from conflict and ends up avoiding valuable discussion as a result. The fear of conflict stymies people and brings out mediocrity from a governance team.
• The lack of commitment – “When leadership teams wait for consensus before taking action, they usually end up with decisions that are made too late and are mildly disagreeable to everyone. This is a recipe for mediocrity and frustration”. With trust and the pursuit of the truth, governance team members will buy in and decisions are more likely to stick.
• The avoidance of accountability – “To hold someone accountable is to care about them enough to risk having them blame you for pointing out their deficiencies.” The point here is not to point the finger but have the freedom to hold one another accountable. In the context of portfolio management, I have heard governance teams say that they are at maximum resource capacity yet try to squeeze in “one more project”. Don’t say one thing and do another. Another example might be in the context of Phase-Gate where a project does not meet the minimum thresholds for approval yet one or more governance team members feel strongly to approve it any way. If the governance team holds themselves accountable, they can at least have the discussion as to why an exception is being made for the approval.
• Inattention to results – “No matter how good a leadership team feels about itself, and how noble its mission might be, if the organization it leads rarely achieves its goals, then, by definition, it’s simply not a good team.” Enough said – results matter. The portfolio governance team must see the forest (the portfolio) and the trees (the projects) and be successful at both levels.

Governance Framework to Enable Accountability

While strategic decision making is at the heart of project portfolio governance, a number of processes are needed to support and complement decision making. Processes such as work intake , Phase-Gate , prioritization , and capacity planning processes provide the right information to support the governance team. Setting up these processes effectively and efficiently is also very important to make portfolio management work.

By getting agreement on these governance processes among decision makers, the governance team can utilize this framework in a more harmonious and successful manner. “Those [organizations] with effective governance have actively designed a set of [governance] mechanisms (committees, budgeting processes, approvals, and so on) that encourage behavior consistent with the organization’s mission, strategy, values, norms, and culture” (Weill 2). One of the key words in this sentence is ‘actively designed’. Successful organizations actively design their governance processes to align with their vision, mission, strategy, and culture. By extension, those organizations that haphazardly design their governance processes may struggle and even fail to make good investment decisions. Effective governance is the single most important predictor of the value an organization generates from its portfolio.

Minimal Viable Governance

When it comes to developing governance processes, the key is to develop the minimal amount of governance that will help effectively manage your projects and portfolios. We can refer to this as “minimal viable governance”. This is a new term analagous to a minimal viable product (MVP). The idea is to right-size governance to match the size and complexity of your portfolio. Most organizations over-engineer their governance process and it becomes bureaucratic. However, when organizations have little or governance processes in place, it becomes chaotic. One major objection we have heard over the years related to project portfolio management is that it is bureaucratic. The reality is that project portfolio management is only bureaucratic if you have the wrong infrastructure. We can use the diagram below to highlight this.

Small portfolios – For organizations with small portfolios, simple governance is needed. Basic mechanisms about how to approve projects and quickly prioritize them are likely sufficient. This can be likened to a simple stop sign that helps control the flow of traffic.

Medium-sized portfolio – for organizations with a moderate sized portfolio, additional processes may be needed. Specific status reporting and resource management along with Phase-Gate processes may be warranted. This is likened to have traffic lights with additional signage to control the flow of more traffic.

Large portfolio – organizations with a very large portfolio can be likened to a California freeway with multiple lanes of traffic. Stricter processes around Work Intake , Phase-Gate, resource management, portfolio planning and dependency management are warranted in order to protect the portfolio and improve strategic decision-making quality.

Large-scale transformation – in rare cases, large companies take on transformational initiatives that are too big to fail and require a level of rigor not needed for the typical project portfolio. In these cases we see very strict and very prescriptive processes dictate how projects should be run. The air-traffic control analogy is used here because airplanes are controlled in a strict way for safety reasons, a lot of governance and infrastructure is required for airplanes to take off, land, and be maintained. Although some experts like to compare portfolio management with air traffic control, in actuality, very few companies need this level of rigor.

Common Objections to Governance

1) “it will slow us down”.

I have heard companies say that adding governance processes will slow down projects. This is like saying stop signs and stop lights slow down traffic. Yes, in a sense, vehicles need to stop at times to make way for other vehicles, but not having traffic lights and stop signs will not make traffic flow faster; it will make it worse. This is an apt analogy for portfolio governance. Project teams may not have to complete as many governance reviews, but without governance there is no way to prioritize work and manage resource capacity. In fact, without governance, more projects will be authorized than can be reasonably completed and will delay the completion of critical projects, just like having a large flow of vehicle without traffic lights will result in gridlock. This is why organizations need to be deliberate with how much governance is needed.

Too much process becomes bureaucratic, but too little process becomes chaotic. The fact is, project portfolio management is only bureaucratic if you have the wrong infrastructure.

2) “we use agile around here”.

A common area of resistance comes from the notion that governance is contrary to agile principles. This is not accurate. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) refers to “lean governance” and “lightweight governance”. Solution trains, agile release trains, and program increments are examples of a structure (governance) that enables agile delivery. Furthermore, some level of senior leadership decision making is still needed to firstly determine whether a project (waterfall or agile) should even be done. High-level estimates can still be provided during an intake process to help leadership determine whether it is the right project to do. Teams can leverage various project frameworks and methodologies to do the work right.

Project Portfolio Governance Success Factors

We conclude with a short list of success factors to help improve project portfolio governance. Many of these touch on topics covered earlier in the post, but are based on years of consulting experience.

• Active engagement – coming prepared, being present, asking questions, proposing solutions
• Open, honest, transparent discussions – working comfortably through conflict to find the best possible answer
• Ability to make tough trade-off decisions – preventing misaligned projects from draining critical resources
• Shifting from a singular project view to an aggregate portfolio view – always asking ‘how will this impact our portfolio?’
• Focus on optimizing portfolio value – finding the right combination of projects that unlock greater portfolio value
• Balancing long-term and short-term needs – not always choosing the easy projects
• Communicating a consistent message – reinforcing business goals and objectives; demonstrating this through results

Does any of this ring true for you? If you are struggling with project portfolio governance for portfolio management, contact us.

Tim is a project and portfolio management consultant with 15 years of experience working with the Fortune 500. He is an expert in maturity-based PPM and helps PMO Leaders build and improve their PMO to unlock more value for their company. He is one of the original PfMP’s (Portfolio Management Professionals) and a public speaker at business conferences and PMI events.

¹Weill, Peter; Jeanne W Ross. IT Governance. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2004. ²Datz, Todd. “ Portfolio Management: How to Do It Right .” CIO.com. Ed. Todd Datz. May 1, 2003. April 26, 2019. ³Lencioni, Patrick. The Advantage. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2012.

What is portfolio governance.

Project portfolio governance refers to the governance of all projects in the portfolio. Good portfolio governance is about having the right people making good strategic decisions with the right information at the right time. Strong portfolio governance forms the foundation of project portfolio management and is involved in all four components of the portfolio management lifecycle.

Why is portfolio governance important?

Project portfolio governance involves strategic decision making. According to Peter Weill and Jeanne W Ross, effective IT governance is the single most important predictor of the value an organization generates from IT. In fact, it has also been said that portfolio management without governance is an empty concept (Datz). Hence, a well-defined and properly structured governance is critical to manage the portfolio.

What are portfolio governance success factors?

1) Active engagement – coming prepared, being present, asking questions, proposing solutions 2) Open, honest, transparent discussions – working comfortably through conflict to find the best possible answer 3) Ability to make tough trade-off decisions – preventing misaligned projects from draining critical resources 4) Shifting from a singular project view to an aggregate portfolio view – always asking ‘how will this impact our portfolio?’ 5) Focus on optimizing portfolio value – finding the right combination of projects that unlock greater portfolio value 6) Balancing long-term and short-term needs – not always choosing the easy projects 7) Communicating a consistent message – reinforcing business goals and objectives; demonstrating this through results

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The Complete Guide to Project Portfolio Management

A step-by-step look at ppm processes, reporting, and software, project portfolio management (ppm) helps organizations to execute projects in support of strategic goals and priorities..

Mature project portfolio management processes ensure organizations deliver more projects on time and within budget. PPM helps organizations to rigorously prioritize their project pipeline and focus on delivering business value.

Without project portfolio management, projects are often selected in a haphazard way, leading to strains on budgets and resources. Teams don’t know how a project will add value to an organization and are often left without the proper tools to manage their work.

In this guide, you’ll learn why your organization needs project portfolio management, and the importance of business strategy, governance, risk management, and stakeholder engagement.

You’ll also see how to manage key PPM processes, such as new project requests and cross-project reporting, using SharePoint .

What we’ll cover

1. what is project portfolio management, 2. project portfolio management software, 3. project portfolio management and business strategy, 4. project portfolio governance, 5. portfolio stakeholder engagement, 6. portfolio risk management, 7. using sharepoint for project portfolio management, project & portfolio management software evaluation guide, your complete resource for selecting new software. , project portfolio management (ppm) aligns projects with strategic goals and creates the right environment for successful project outcomes..

PPM helps organizations to answer questions such as:

• Are we making good decisions about projects?
• Are we working on the right projects at the right time?
• Do we have the resources to take on this project?
• How are projects currently performing?
• Can we run multiple projects at the same time?
• What are the interdependencies between projects?
• What risks arise from those interdependencies?
• Will our projects meet key strategic goals?
• Do we have a strong mix of short and long-term projects?

Project portfolio management differs from project management in a few ways.

Project Management

• A project is a temporary endeavour with a defined beginning and end, scope, and resources.
• Project management is the “application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements.’’
• A project manager focuses on planning and managing individual projects, including reporting, risks, and resources.

Portfolio Management

• A portfolio is a collection of projects grouped together.
• Project portfolio management refers to “the centralized management of one or more project portfolios to achieve strategic objectives”.
• An organization can have one overarching portfolio or a portfolio for each area of the business.
• A project portfolio manager is concerned with all projects within the organization.

Unlike a project,  a portfolio  is not defined by a start or end state. Instead, new projects replace completed projects on a regular basis.

A project portfolio manager has several responsibilities including:

• Creating and implementing standardized project processes.
• Assessing new project requests according to business goals.
• Improving communication between senior management and project teams.
• Tracking and reporting on portfolio performance.
• Coaching project managers and teams.
• Balancing resource allocation across the portfolio.
• Managing risk.
• Dealing with at-risk projects.

To deliver effective PPM, a portfolio manager needs access to accurate data to make informed decisions.

They will also require strong communication skills, especially stakeholder engagement, negotiation, and conflict resolution.

Benefits of Project Portfolio Management

You may be thinking that PPM sounds like another layer of process that will slow down your projects!

In fact, the Project Management Institutes reports that  organizations using PPM  complete 35% more of their projects successfully.

The goal of project portfolio management is to avoid working on projects of little value that drain resources.

Instead, PPM helps companies to pick the right projects and maximize the impact of each project in several ways.

• Project portfolio management  aligns proposed projects with business strategy . This means new project requests are reviewed and prioritized against defined goals and only high-value projects are executed.
• Implementing PPM  increases visibility across all projects  with standardized processes and templates, often managed with software. This improves reporting, decision-making, and risk management.
• Communication  between project teams and stakeholders is strengthened, leading to better feedback and engagement during execution.
• By taking a  complete view of resources , project portfolio managers avoid bottlenecks on key projects.
• Data collection from past projects makes it easier to predict the success of future projects, informing  business forecasting and planning .
• Projects are often interconnected in some way, for example, resources. Managing  risk at the portfolio level  reduces the impact of issues on interdependent projects.
• Project teams are supported  with clear, simple processes, templates, and ongoing training.

Now we know why project portfolio management is critical, let’s look at  some consequences  of not implementing PPM.

• Poor project selection : If business goals are not defined, senior management doesn’t have a framework for selecting new projects. This leads to low-value projects, wasted resources, and duplicated efforts.
• Project overload : Without the means to prioritize the pipeline, organizations attempt to complete too many projects at the same time. Capacity, not strategy,  drives project execution – if people are available, the next project is launched.
• Under-resourced projects : When projects are planned at a departmental-level, there’s no central view of budget or resource allocation. This places enormous pressure on already-on stretched project teams.
• Sunk-cost fallacy : Underperforming projects are not canceled due to existing investment. In some cases, there is no process for identifying and ending such projects.
• Reduced competitiveness : Project delays and failure mean slower time-to-market. If completed projects are not aligned with business goals, you may find yourself with a product or service that no-one wants.
• No project maturity : Without standardized processes, project managers have to re-invent the wheel with every new project. This means success is harder to replicate across teams and little effort is made to improve project management.

Get a weighted scoring sheet to easily compare different solutions in four key areas. 

As you’ve probably guessed, project portfolio management requires a shift in how projects are valued, planned, and delivered at every level in the organization.

Choosing the right project portfolio management software can facilitate this new way of working.

Here are five benefits you can expect when using  project portfolio management software :

• A standardized approach to project management in your organization with pre-defined project templates.
• Complete visibility into your project pipeline including new project requests, current projects, and resource allocation.
• Improved reporting, decision-making, and collaboration within teams.
• Higher project success rates with more effective project planning and budget management.
• Greater insight into the business value of the solution delivered by the project.

Evaluating Project Portfolio Management Software

With so many project portfolio management software solutions on the market today, how do you know which one is the right one for you?

If you are struggling to select a PPM solution, try our free evaluation kit !

The guide includes assessment questions in four key areas (project, portfolio, work, and organizational capabilities) and a weighted scoring sheet.

Below is a selection of guidance and questions from each section of the kit.

1. Portfolio Capabilities

Start with portfolio capabilities, with a focus on increasing control and visibility for senior executives.

Key features include:

• A scalable, consistent project request management system.
• High-level, real-time portfolio dashboards.
• Resource Management.

Use these questions to evaluate portfolio requirements:

• Can project requests be easily captured, reviewed and monitored?
• Does the product deliver immediate visibility into project portfolios with real-time dashboards?
• Do resource reports show what work is assigned to whom and at what amount across a project?

2. Project Capabilities

Next, you’ll need to review project management capabilities.

• A collaborative toolset to reduce administration work.
• Project reporting, including status reports, emailed reports, and project dashboards.
• Standardized templates.

These questions will help you to assess project management capabilities in the tool:

• Can a new project site be created from a standardized template or copied from an existing project site?
• Is it possible to create, calculate, and update the timeline using an in-browser task scheduler?
• Does the product include customizable Kanban Boards?

3. Work Capabilities

Work management and collaboration capabilities are particularly useful for project team members, who want to contribute to the success of a project.

They need a tool to view team-member focused reports, efficiently manage their work, and connect with others working on the project.

The three key feature sets you should be looking under work management are:

• Centralized project sites with all project information in one place.
• Simple task management to find, do, and update work.
• Collaborative functions like discussions and forums.

Use these questions to evaluate work management features:

• Does the product make it easy for team members to collaborate regardless of their location?
• Can team members find and do their assigned work quickly?
• Can team members manage their non-project work in the project site?

4. Organizational Capabilities

Finally, the solution should support your current project management maturity levels with the option to grow in time.

Organizational project management capabilities are particularly important for project management champions, who are tasked with implementing and continuously improving project management practices in an organization.

Three key capabilities you should look for under organizational project management are:

• Practical deployment with low IT burden.
• Best-practice project management templates.
• Highly flexible and configurable solution.

These questions will help you to assess organizational project management capabilities:

• Can the product be quickly deployed on premise with minimal IT burden?
• Can you start quickly with out-of-the-box templates and the amount of project management process you need right now?
• Will you have a dedicated Customer Success Architect?

In addition to evaluating the above areas, it’s also important to consider non-technical elements , such as deployment and support, training resources, ease-of-use, and the vendor’s track record.

Project Portfolio Management Software: Build or Buy?

As you begin to evaluate project portfolio management software, senior management may ask about the cost of buying versus the cost of building a solution internally.

This is a common objection to purchasing new software and is a logical question if you have an in-house development team.

After all, it is reasonable to expect these individuals to have the skills, knowledge, and time to build the solution according to your specific needs.

However, organizations who build their own software solutions frequently find it is cheaper and quicker to buy a solution tailored to their needs.

Moreover, these solutions typically ship with maintenance, training, support, and continuous upgrades – areas that an internal team with multiple commitments are unlikely to service.

If you are asked to compare the cost of building or buying software, start with these questions:

• What other projects are the development team working on?
• How configurable is the software you wish to purchase?
• What is the build v buy cost analysis?
• How long will deployment take?
• Is the software easy to use?

At BrightWork, we recommend using your existing SharePoint infrastructure for PPM , which we’ll cover in more detail later on.

Aligning projects to strategic goals is a core tenant of project portfolio management.

Business strategy defines key objectives and the future state the organization wishes to reach.

Strategy  is guided by Vision (where the company wants to be) and Mission (what the company does). These objectives are translated into initiatives or projects to deliver business value.

Applying strategy to project portfolios typically means doing the right projects and doing the projects right.

Without a clear ‘big’ picture, it’s too easy to waste time and resources on the wrong projects or to assume all projects are equal and deserve the same support.

Creating a link between a project and a larger business goal also helps to motivate teams. If individuals understand why a task or process is important to the project and the company, they likely to be more engaged.

What is Business Strategy?

In his 1985 work, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, Michael Porter defined strategy as “a process of analysis which is designed to achieve the competitive advantage of an organization over another in the long term.”

He further named three types of strategy – cost leadership, differentiation, or focus – and recommended organizations pursue one strategy type to achieve the best results.

• Cost Leadership refers to minimizing the costs of delivering products or services for an organization – not necessarily to reducing costs for consumers.
• Differentiation requires organizations to make products or services that are different from competitors.
• Focus involves concentrating on a particular market.

Strategy can also be defined as “a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision-making.’’

Decision-making is key to this statement, and indeed, to successful project portfolio management.

A clear strategy helps senior executives to decide which projects to start or stop, how to distribute resources, and how to manage risks.

Later on, you’ll see how key reports and templates on SharePoint surface critical project data to support decision-making.

Strategy also plays a role in governance, for example, project selection and portfolio reviews.

We’ll take a closer look at governance in the next section.

See how to evaluate software for project, portfolio, work, and organizational project management.

Governance is another critical area for successful project portfolio management..

The Association for Project Management defines project portfolio governance as:

“The selection, prioritization, and control of an organization’s projects and programs in line with its strategic objectives and capacity to deliver. The goal is to balance change initiatives and business-as-usual while optimizing return on investment.”

As you can see, governance is closely linked with business strategy.

Strong governance helps organizations to select the right projects at the right time whilst also ensuring these projects are successful.

By taking a proactive approach to risk management, resource allocation, and project interdependencies at the portfolio level, senior executives can remove common roadblocks for teams.

At every stage of the governance process, senior management make decisions about projects and are accountable for the outcomes of those decisions, especially the success of approved projects.

Governance processes should help, not hinder, project teams, and be appropriate to the size of your company. Don’t create paperwork just for the sake of it!

4 Elements of Project Portfolio Governance

1. define the portfolio.

Governance starts with a process for reviewing new project requests and ongoing projects.

As business opportunities and challenges evolve, so too should your strategy. As a result, it’s important to define the project portfolio two to three times per year.

New strategies become business cases, which in turn, may become approved projects.

2.  Optimize portfolio value

Next, approve projects that support clear strategic goals .

This includes reviewing resource allocation and deciding when to start the project, based on priorities and current projects.

Underperforming or delayed projects that are draining resources are concluded early with resources moved to other projects.

Together, the processes for defining and optimizing the portoflio form a feedback loop. Learnings from ongoing projects become inputs for refining the approval process, improving project outcomes.

3. Protect portfolio value

Once the project is under way, progress, risks, and resources are closely monitored. If needed, steps are taken to resolve any problems and get the project back on track.

Depending on the orgainzation, the Project Management Office (PMO) reports on portfolio performance to senior management and stakeholders.

With a tool like BrightWork, senior managers can create customized dashboards to track any project in the portfolio in real-time.

4. Deliver portfolio value

The solution, service, or product created by the project team is delivered to stakeholders. The project must generate value for the orgainzation.

From time-to-time, senior managers should review the performance of the overall portfolio , particularly around alignment with business strategy.

• Portfolio Governance Team

Many organizations appoint a project portfolio governance team to implement the above steps.

It’s important for those involved with project portfolio governance to:

• Have the right level of authority to make key decisions.
• Exert influence within the organization.
• Understand the vision, mission, and strategic goals of the organization.
• Work closely with teams and managers to develop a balanced portfolio.
• Be comfortable with saying ‘No’.
• Have access to up-to-date project information.
• Be accountable for project outcomes.

In later sections, we’ll take a closer look at using key BrightWork capabilities, such as project request management , to enable portfolio governance on SharePoint.

PPM Software Evaluation Guide

Download your free guide, including a weighted scoring sheet for easy comparisons, stakeholders are defined as “individuals or organizations who are actively involved in the project, or whose interests may be positively or negatively affected as a result of project execution or successful project completion”..

These individuals or groups may be involved in the project itself or will be impacted by the outcomes of the project, for example, using a new product.

Introducing PPM processes will change how teams and departments deliver projects. It may mean fewer projects are executed or project approval policies become more robust.

People will resist this change, especially if they feel they are going to lose out.

Getting stakeholders on board will reduce this friction, helping you to implement effective portfolio management and governance.

Stakeholders typically exert considerable influence and authority within an organization.

They can play a key role in defining business strategy, which in turn, drives portfolios and project selection.

Winning the support and trust of stakeholders will improve portfolio performance in key areas such as resource allocation and risk management.

It’s also important to understand how portfolio stakeholders will measure the success of PPM, for example, more projects completed on time, increase revenue, or entry into new markets.

Finally, making stakeholder engagement part of portfolio governance is an important signal to project managers and the PMO.

Stakeholder engagement should be part of every project; happy stakeholders are a vital metric of success.

Stakeholder Examples

Typically, stakeholders are categorized as either internal or external to the organization.

Internal Stakeholders

• Senior managers
• Project Management Office
• Portfolio Managers
• Project Sponsors
• Project managers
• Project Team
• Department or Operation managers
• Internal customers or end-users.

External Stakeholders

• Customers and end-users
• Contractors
• Local community
• Regulatory agencies. 

As PPM focuses on aligning projects with business strategy, it’s unlikely you will need to engage with external stakeholders on a regular basis.

However, it is important to consider external stakeholders and ensure project managers are communicating with these groups as needed.

Let’s review a four-step process to identify and engage your stakeholders.

How to Identify and Engage Portfolio Stakeholders

1.  identify and prioritize stakeholders.

Start by figuring out your portfolio stakeholders – anyone with an interest in the portfolio or who can influence projects, either positively or negatively.

In addition to the list above, use these questions to find potential stakeholders.

• Who has a financial or emotional investment in projects in your organization?
• Who will be impacted by project portfolio management?
• Who defines organizational strategy?
• What business functions should be involved?
• Who gets more or less work?
• Who must change?
• Who must approve important decisions?
• Who influences your stakeholders?

Check any organizational charts and ask stakeholders about other people who could be affected by PPM processes.

Next, prioritize this list. Stakeholders are f categorized based on their power, interest, and influence .

• High power, highly interested . Manage and engage these individuals closely.
• High power, less interested . Keep these individuals up-to-date.
• Low power, highly intereste Keep these individuals up-to-date.
• Low power, less interested . Engage these individuals from time-to-time.

2. Plan Stakeholder Engagement

Using this list, plan your engagement or communication strategy . Different stakeholders will need different information at varying intervals about the portfolio.

Updates include:

• Recently approved projects.
• Changes to existing projects.
• Benefits management.
• Commentary on portfolio performance, including risk and budget.
• Impact of new or changed business strategy on the portfolio.

Here are some suggestions to help you develop a communication plan. These recommendations will depend on your prioritized list, available software, and stakeholder preferences.

• Senior managers and sponsors : Quarterly review meetings and real-time dashboards in a project portfolio management tool.
• The PMO : Monthly review meetings and real-time dashboards in a project portfolio management tool.
• Project Managers : Monthly reports shared via email or accessed in a project portfolio management tool.

Be sure to document your engagement strategy as part of the portfolio governance plan.

3. Manage Stakeholder Engagement

During this stage, you’ll need to leverage your communication skills, including conflict management and negotiation, to ensure stakeholders are informed, involved, and happy!

Real-time project portfolio management software can simplify and improve stakeholder engagement. We’ll cover stakeholder engagement with SharePoint in a later chapter.

4. Monitor Stakeholder Engagement

Like business strategy, portfolio stakeholders will change. You’ll need to periodically add new stakeholders or remove existing contacts from the stakeholders engagement plan.

Don’t forget to ask for feedback on how to improve engagement, for example, increased usage of email reports or customized dashboards.

Free PPM Software Evaluation Guide

Evaluate software for project, portfolio, work, and organizational project management capabilities , bringing projects together into a portfolio can surface risks, particularly relating to interdependencies between projects and resources assigned to multiple projects., what is portfolio risk.

Portfolio risk refers to the combined impact of risks within all projects in the portfolio and the interdependencies between those projects.

As an organization tackles more projects, risks multiply –as do the consequences if risks become a reality for ongoing projects.

Portfolio risk also refers to the balance of projects within the portfolio, for example, high-risk with high-reward or low-risk with low-reward.

Portfolio risk management includes identifying and managing risks for individual projects as well as managing the risk posed by each project to the overall portfolio and the organization.

Portfolio risk management often forms part of enterprise risk management , which focuses on larger concerns such as finance, security, and reputation.

There are three main types of portfolio risks :

• Component risks: These are risks presented by individual projects and programs. Component risks also include interdependencies between projects:
• Outcome interdependencies : Delivering the outcome on a project depends on another project.
• Schedule interdependencies : One project depends on the timely start or completion of another project
• Resource interdependencies : A project used the same resources and skills of another project.
• Overall risks refer to the interaction between component risks.
• Structural risks arise from how the portfolio is created and the relationship between various elements.

Portfolio risks may also be internal or external to an organization or caused by how an organization operates (structural risks).

Managing Portfolio Risks

Managing risks starts when defining the project portfolio and is part of ongoing portfolio optimization.

Portfolio risks are not static. As mentioned above, portfolios change in response to strategy, governance, and new stakeholders. Each change, every new project, brings different risks.

Of course, you have to begin somewhere. A database of past projects and the risk register for current projects are good starting points for assessing the current portfolio.

If you are using project portfolio management software, gather data on the performance of ongoing projects, including flagged risks.

Cross-project reporting dashboards in SharePoint increase visibility into risks across the portfolio and within individual projects.

It’s easy to drill down into a particular project to uncover more information about a risk such as causes, consequences, and the risk score.

In this review, think about:

• Interdependencies between projects, such as resources.
• The cost of not completing certain projects.
• The ratio of high-risk projects to low-risk projects.
• The organization’s tolerance for risk.
• The complexity and scale of project risks.
• Contingency measures of addressing risk for both individual projects and the overall portfolio.
• If current projects are contributing to the goals of the portfolio and if completed projects delivered tangible business value.

Based on this review, categorize projects based on a risk rating:

• Stop : Projects with low economic value and low strategic alignment.
• Accelerate : Projects with high economic value and high strategic alignment.
• Must-do : Projects with low economic value and high strategic alignment.
• Monitor : Projects with high economic value and low strategic alignment.
• Evaluate : Projects with medium economic value and low strategic alignment.

With a clearer picture of the portfolio, you can now resolve potential risks. This may include:

• Pausing a high-risk, high-reward project until another project is completed.
• Reducing the scope of a project.
• Ending a high-risk project earlier than expected.

Portfolio risk management also applies to new project requests and ongoing projects.

When reviewing a new request, it’s important to consider if the project will add more risk to the portfolio. If so, you’ll need to decide whether to reject the project or go ahead with some contingencies.

Once a project moves into execution, use roll-up dashboards and reports in your project management software to track risks on the project level. This way, you can get a ‘helicopter’ view of the big picture with the ability to zoom in for more details as needed.

You’ll see how to manage portfolio risks with SharePoint in a later chapter.

A collaborative web-based tool, SharePoint is an ideal solution for project portfolio management.

SharePoint is used by over 400,000 customers in 250,000 organizations worldwide, increasing the likelihood of existing infrastructure in your organization.  Leveraging this existing environment will reduce the impact on IT resources.

Building project sites in SharePoint creates a single source of data for better reporting and increased visibility. Everything from project plans to tasks, documents, and reports can be stored in a standardized way in one place.

When  extended with software like BrightWork , organizations can use SharePoint to:

• Report across multiple projects and portfolios.
• Manage new project requests.
• Create reporting portfolios with sites and sub sites.
• Leverage metric tiles to track progress quickly.
• Automate reporting updates via email.
• Predict project outcomes with scorecards.
• Track progress in real-time with dashboards.
• Manage risks at the portfolio level.
• Enable employee timesheets.
• Support project teams with out-of-the-box configurable templates.

With SharePoint, you can create a project hierarchy , with sites and subsites, to mirror organizational structure.

In the below screenshot, the top-level site (BrightWork Projects) has a subsite, BrightWork Project Office (BPO).

Underneath the BPO are a series of mini-project offices with project sites to manage the individual initiatives in each department.

In this chapter, we’ll explore how to leverage BrightWork for project and portfolio management on SharePoint.

You’ll see how to:

• Implement governance with the Project Request Manager Template.
• Report across portfolios and create personalize dashboards.
• Track project and portfolio risks.
• Engage stakeholders with automated reports.
• Manage resource allocation across multiple projects.

Governance and Project Request Management

As mentioned above, selecting the right project to execute at the right time with the right resources is key to PPM.

Without a scalable approach to new projects:

• Project teams end up working on low-value initiatives or too many projects at the same time.
• Projects are planned in isolation, leading to stretched resources.
• Failing projects are not ended, wasting more resources.

Taking a structured approach to project prioritization not only helps to align projects with strategic goals – projects are planned with a holistic view of the pipeline.

This improves resource management, project sequencing, and engagement levels within teams.

Out-of-the-box,  BrightWork  comes pre-populated with a simple process to track project requests all the way from Draft to Approval and Project Site Creation.

Using this template, anyone can log a request for a new project.  Those requests are then queued up and sent to the approver (typically a senior executive) for consideration.

The  BrightWork Project Request Manager  template is split into four different states:

• Draft:  A new project proposal is submitted.
• Review:  The relevant individual receives an email notification about the new request.
• Pending Decision : Once assessed, the reviewer makes a decision about the proposal, including sending the proposal to senior management for further review.
• The request is Approved  or  Rejected . The approver can opt to create a project site based on the submitted request.

Automated email notifications and reminders keep the process flowing.

Below is the PRM command center in BrightWork in action. As you can see, it’s easy to move through the entire project request life-cycle from logging a request to project site creation after the project is approved.

Reporting with BrightWork Portfolio Templates

BrightWork ships with two key templates for  portfolio reporting : Project Office and Portfolio Reporting.

1. Project Office Template

BrightWork uses the hierarchical structure of SharePoint to create a logical project management structure for organizations.

This hierarchy typically aligns to business structure, for example, a Project Office for Marketing, IT, and Finance.

The  Project Office template  displays data from all the projects located under it in the hierarchy in a single dashboard.

Individual project sites sit under the main Project Office. As team members work on and update tasks at the project level, this information rolls up automatically to portfolio dashboards for a quick snapshot of all projects.

Using the Project Office, senior management can track resources, work, issues, and risks at the portfolio level. At any time, it’s easy to click into a particular project site for more detail.

2. Portfolio Reporting Template

Like the Project Office Template, the Portfolio Template Report tracks metrics from multiple project sites.

However, the template only reports on projects added to the list, making it useful for personalized reporting. Senior management can create dynamic, tailored project offices as needed.

The Project Office Template and Portfolio Reporting Template both include dashboards with:

• Project Status Reports and Charts
• Project Gantt / Schedules
• Work Reports and Charts
• Issue and Risk Reports and Charts
• Project Status Reports
• Scorecards of Key Metrics
• Exception and In-Trouble Reports.

Portfolio Risk Management

Drill down into the detail of selected projects

When you see a project that needs attention, you can simply drill down into the project to view why it is in poor health.

If the project has overdue work, you can remind the responsible party by sending a detailed email. This can also be automated to save time on a regular basis.

Automated Reports for Stakeholder Engagement

One of the most common challenges faced by senior executives is a lack of visibility into ongoing and proposed projects.

BrightWork provides a series of reporting dashboards in SharePoint, with metrics and traffic light indicators, delivering instant visibility across all the projects in an organization.

The beauty of using BrightWork and a hierarchical project structure in SharePoint is that the portfolio dashboards roll up information from all the projects below.

Project managers create a status report at the project lev; this data percolates up to the portfolio dashboard used by senior executives.

They no longer have to go chasing updates.  It’s all there on the portfolio dashboard in real-time. The dashboards can be built with visually striking charts, KPIs, and scorecards to quickly understand the status of the project.

With BrightWork, the reports can be emailed on request or on a schedule, for example,  an email every Friday morning with an update on that weeks’ progress.

Of course, they can check the Project Office site at any time for an update and see the information in real-time as well.

This kind of real-time visibility allows senior executives to find projects in trouble and drill down into detail specific projects that require attention.

BrightWork Reporter

Project reports must be actionable and relevant to your team. However, it’s simply not feasible to create and share reports for each person on your team!

Instead, create a single report with personalization options.

The BrightWork Reporter web part  allows users to:

• Filter data
• Add or remove columns
• Save personal report views.

These options are found in the Reporter ribbon, available on any report in a BrightWork project site.

As we’ll see below, BrightWork Reporter is also used to report across multiple sites, sub sites, and lists rendering as a single report.

Sharing Reports

With BrightWork, you can  build and share reports via email  quickly to increase project visibility.

There are a few ways to share projects reports via email:

• Ad-hoc, for example, a last-minute update before a meeting.
• Scheduled emails, for example, a weekly work report.

Dashboards should be saved as either .PDF or .XPS format and shared as email attachments.

Email options are located in the Reporter ribbon. Simply fill in the relevant information and send the report.

Recipients can click on the links in the email to get more information in the relevant project site.

Resource Management

Resources should be tracked at the portfolio level at two key points in the project lifecycle – new requests and ongoing projects. These reports help with business planning and talent management.

New project requests

When assessing new project requests, it’s important to understand proposed  resource allocation , even at a very high-level.

Stakeholders need to know what resources are needed on the new project and how these allocations affect other projects, both ongoing and upcoming.

Even if the exact details of every task are not yet available, taking a larger view of the pipeline helps to balance resources across projects to avoid over-allocation and bottlenecks at critical milestones.

In some cases, a new project may be delayed until another project is complete, thus freeing up resources.

Resource allocation reports can also identify skills shortages that could impact on current or future projects. In these instances, your organization can opt to train existing team members, recruit, or outsource certain tasks.

Current projects

Like resource reports for individual projects, tracking resources at the portfolio levels helps senior management to oversee work distribution throughout the organization.   Resource management reports  show over and under-allocated resources on current projects.

How to use Resource Allocation Reports on SharePoint

Resource Allocation is part of the Project Request Management (PRM) Template from BrightWork.

The Resource Allocation list allows users to plan resources at a high-level when submitting a request.

Offering multiple project and portfolio reporting options, SharePoint will help you to save time and deliver key information to the right people at the right time.

Grace Windsor

Read more SharePoint and project management articles from  Grace !

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How to Use monday.com for PPM

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monday.com is a leading project management solution that is increasingly being used as project portfolio management software. Many project managers already know or can intuitively figure out how to use monday work management for traditional project management task work, but it will take some customization and research to develop your monday workspace for project portfolio management. 

In this guide, we’ll walk you through some of the features, templates, and best practices for setting up and using monday.com as a project portfolio management (PPM) platform for your organization.

How to Use monday.com for Project Portfolio Management

monday work management can be used effectively for project portfolio management if you bring in the right stakeholders and build up your platform with relevant templates and reports. To get started with monday.com for PPM, follow these best practices:

Develop and manage portfolio-wide goals

If your business wants to use project portfolio management software effectively, you need to first identify your overall portfolio goals. Do you have specific industries or business sizes you want to work with? Is there an approximate budget you want to stick to per project? Are you hoping to break into a new service line or further specialize in an existing one? 

These kinds of goals need to be solidified by organizational leaders from the beginning so project teams can cater individual projects to these goals. Creating SMART goals is a great place to start. The Goal Widget and the Quarterly Objectives template are built-in tools from monday work management that can help you identify goals and track progress over time.

Create a project inventory

One of the first and most crucial phases of successful PPM is inventorying all current projects and resources in your organization’s portfolio.

To facilitate this important phase, monday.com makes it easy to capture relevant project and organizational data from individual projects with in-depth boards and dashboards. Users can include custom columns for both financial and non-financial data to help in the analysis phase. They can also view, share, and comment on project and portfolio information through monday.com’s collaboration features.

Use monday templates and data-driven selection criteria

In the analysis phase, data collected from your project inventory will be evaluated to assess the portfolio’s strengths and weaknesses. Leaders can take a closer look at the problems individual projects are trying to solve, then determine if they are still relevant or if there are multiple projects trying to solve the same problem. monday’s SWOT Analysis template is a helpful resource for evaluating your project inventory comprehensively.

Furthermore, the monday.com Workload View and the Resource Management template can help you identify the resources allocated to each project and if there are enough of them. Users can check dependencies between tasks and projects as well as risks involved with Gantt chart views. All this information can help company leadership make a thorough analysis in preparation for the next phase of project planning and development.

monday.com offers priority column options for scoring and ranking to show which projects deliver the highest benefits with the least amount of risk. Custom dashboards can show real-time, high-level data for budgets, goals, schedules, and resources. Dashboards also include milestones to mark significant checkpoints that help measure project alignment and performance.

Decision-makers now have enough information to rank projects based on importance, relevance, and other factors. With this information at the ready, it’s time to make the hard decision of stopping projects that are not helpful or delaying projects the company cannot afford to implement simultaneously.

Define roles and responsibilities

Now that you’ve prioritized projects based on your company goals, budget, and other data, it’s time to define (or redefine) project team roles and responsibilities. You’ll want to clearly designate roles on individual project boards, but it’s also important that project and task owner identities are included in your project portfolio workspace. 

monday.com’s People Column can be used across a variety of board views; as a bonus, using the People Column makes it easier to notify relevant users when certain tasks or projects are passed to them or to their board.

Factor in budgetary requirements

Although you likely already reviewed budgets in the goal-setting and project inventory stages of PPM, it’s important to continue monitoring how your teams are performing against those budgets. Individual project boards can be outfitted with the Numbers Column and specific dashboard widgets to track costs over time. 

With automations and board integrations, individual project budget data can be filtered into your project portfolio board to help you measure progress from a central location. monday’s Budget Tracker template is also helpful, depending on the complexity of the projects and finances you want to measure.

Train relevant teams and stakeholders

Whether your organization is new to monday.com or has been using it as PM software for a while, it’s important to make sure all project team members and other stakeholders know how to use the tool for PPM purposes. Most importantly, make sure everyone follows the same processes and procedures for team collaboration and communication, whether they’re leaving comments, tagging other users, or updating status columns.

Workspace administrators also have the ability to create teams on monday.com. These teams make it easier for all users to know who works on what projects and what tasks they should be handling.

Example of team communication in monday.com

Monitor portfolio success with monday reporting features

Once leadership has realigned and rebalanced the company’s project portfolio, the initiative shifts to continued portfolio management. The most useful monday.com features at this point are for communication and collaboration. Another vital step leaders should take is connecting individual project boards to the portfolio management board and tracking performance via notifications.

monday.com dashboards offer clear, real-time visuals to provide all stakeholders with important information. Color-coded statuses give information at a glance that instantly shows which projects are on track and which ones need immediate intervention. Board automations also simplify and standardize processes to make continued PPM monitoring easier.

monday.com PPM Templates

monday.com offers several ready-to-use PPM templates in its template library. Users can customize templates by adding action items, reordering items according to priority, and adjusting plans to meet specific business needs. For your own project portfolio management setup, consider incorporating the following templates into your workflow:

• Project Portfolio Management template
• Quarterly Objectives template
• Marketing SWOT Analysis template
• Resource Management template
• Budget Tracker template

Benefits of Using monday.com for PPM

monday.com is not strictly used as project portfolio management software and requires some work on your organization’s part to get it set up correctly. However, once you’ve taken the appropriate actions to create your monday.com PPM workspace, your team can expect to reap these benefits:

• Increased visibility: With monday.com’s PPM approach, upper-level leadership and project managers can more easily juggle multiple projects at once, all while keeping bigger organizational goals and standards in mind. monday.com’s finance widgets and templates are especially helpful for remembering and sticking to predetermined budgets and resourcing requirements when project scopes get out of hand.
• Clearer strategy: monday.com’s Goal Widget and Quarterly Objectives template make it easy to set and track portfolio-wide strategic goals and mandates. With this clearer visualization of project management organizational strategy, individual teams can more easily understand how their project work fits into organizational goals and portfolio managers and business development leaders can rely on these features to guide their selection of new project work.
• Defined roles and responsibilities: monday.com makes it very easy to set up teams and add users in the People Column. With its various ways that users can track individual progress and communicate with each other, users at all levels can see where bottlenecks are developing and who on their team needs additional support.
• Several layouts and dashboards to choose from: monday.com includes a number of different board views, dashboards, and widgets for project management. While some of these are more generic and can be used by any team for better portfolio planning and visualization, others are designed to help with industry-specific tracking your team could benefit from.

Read More: Top 10 Project Management Software

Project Portfolio Management Software Alternatives to Consider

monday.com is a robust project management and PPM solution, but it’s not for everyone. Perhaps your organization already works with a suite of products from vendors like Adobe or Microsoft. Maybe one of the lesser-known platforms fits better into your team’s project management tool budget. Or maybe you’re interested in a dedicated PPM solution that doesn’t focus on other types of project and work management. If your organization is looking for monday.com alternatives for PPM, these are some of the top ones available today:

• Adobe Workfront
• Clarity PPM
• Easy Projects
• KeyedIn Solutions
• Microsoft Project (MS Project or Microsoft Project Online)
• Planisware Orchestra
• Planview PPM Pro
• PPM Express
• Zoho Projects

Each of these project portfolio management software solutions — monday.com included — offers standout features that differentiate them from their competitors. The best next step for your team is to conduct further research into the solutions that sound most relevant to your team’s needs. From there, look into options for free trials or demos so you can fully experience how the software will work once it’s up and running.

monday.com is a flexible online work platform that is suitable for a variety of use cases, including project management, task management, sales and CRM, and project portfolio management. It’s a highly visual, customizable solution that can be configured for all types of users, business sizes, and industries. Its features help users who are managing projects to streamline work processes, centralize information, and improve communication and collaboration across the organization with project visualizations, templates, and reporting features.

monday.com is a great solution for project portfolio management software because it centralizes up-to-date and relevant information from individual projects into a single work platform. Real-time information is accessible to all, especially to decision-makers. The project management software provides different views, making it possible for stakeholders to look at the bigger picture or at dynamic detailed views, automation options, conversation tools, and custom dashboards.

monday.com comes in five different plan options:

• Individual plan: $0 for up to two seats.
• Basic plan: $8 per seat per month billed annually or $10 per seat per month billed monthly.
• Standard plan: $10 per seat per month billed annually or $12 per seat per month billed monthly.
• Pro plan: $16 per seat per month billed annually or $20 per seat per month billed monthly.
• Enterprise plan: Pricing information available upon request.

Learn more about monday.com Software: Pricing & Features

PPM software solutions are platforms that help organizations manage and analyze their project portfolios, both for current and ongoing projects as well as for prospective projects in the pipeline. PPM software allows companies to manage all project planning and scope data, including portfolio-wide goals, selection criteria, project timelines, budgets, resources, teams, and progress toward goals. Looking at the bigger picture, project portfolio management software allows organizations to analyze the overall direction, relevance, and health of the projects they’re taking on. 

Since the early 2000s, project portfolio management (PPM) has enabled companies to evaluate current and potential projects and account for their likely success, risks, and alignment with the overall company’s strategy. With the help of project portfolio management software like monday.com, companies can select better projects within the context of their short- and long-term goals, creating a better internal team and customer service experience simultaneously.

Many project portfolio management software solutions are actually project management suites with specialized modules and templates for PPM. However, some software suites focus solely on PPM and the tasks that come with strategic project portfolio management.

To accomplish project team goals, project portfolio management software usually includes the following features and functions:

• Project tracking
• Budget and finance tracking
• Risk management
• Resource planning and management
• Data visualization and reporting

PPM software can be used by both small businesses and large enterprises across various industries. It is especially helpful when the portfolio manager or the project management office (PMO) wants to standardize how project work fits into the bigger picture of business operations and organizational strategy. However, PPM software is also useful for project managers and project teams who want to view individual projects contextually, identify and mitigate risks, and make other decisions based on greater organizational goals.

Although PPM software is helpful for a variety of industries and use cases, these are some of the most common:

• Digital marketing agencies
• Creative and media teams
• Professional services and consulting firms
• Construction companies
• IT services (internal and external)
• Software development teams

Trending Project Portfolio Management Software

monday is a solid PPM option for many teams. However, if you are looking into other options besides monday.com, these featured vendors are definitely worth a look:

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Project Portfolio Meetings – The Key to Managing Your Multi-Project Landscape

If you are working on the PMO, you may also have to help manage the project portfolio . In this case, the preparation of project portfolio meetings should be one of your key tasks. As a rule, high-level employees will be among the participants. After the meeting, they should feel they have been thoroughly briefed and were able make informed decisions in all cases on the agenda.

In a nutshell:  in your position as the PMO, you demonstrate to all participants in the project portfolio meeting that you are in full control of the project landscape.

Therefore, it is important to prepare this regular multi-project management meeting well, conduct it in a focused manner and keep it short. Thus, it will be perceived to be of particular value.

Definition Project Portfolio Meeting: The project portfolio meeting is a meeting recurring at regular intervals addressing all projects in the multi-project landscape as a whole. The meeting enables participants to make important decisions furthering good management of the project landscape.

In this article, you will learn about the following topics:

• Challenges of the project portfolio meeting
• Who should participate in the meeting?
• What is the right cadence?
• What form should a successful agenda take?
• How do you prepare a project portfolio meeting properly?
• What are the criteria for projects that should be discussed in the meeting?

Let us get started.

Challenges of the Project Portfolio Meeting

For the PMO, the challenges of the project portfolio meeting consist in the following:

• Inviting the right individuals who are authorized to make decisions; ideally, they will also be present every time
• Having to focus on the important projects, as this group of people generally has little time to spare
• Making this meeting a regular occurrence, as decisions are expected
• Ensuring the data presented is complete, up to date and plausible, i.e. prepared well by the PMO

Special Download: How to setup a PMO in 4 simple steps (PDF file)

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What will come in handy with your PMO responsibilities is the TPG “PPM Paradise” .

The top-level portfolio reports are fed from a project list stored in a central database. It is connected to a resource pool. Underneath, you find the methods for individual project management, which automatically fill the project list with information, such as for example the traffic light colors. The coordination of resources between project managers and team leaders is likewise part of this, as is the integration with accounting for forecasts, payment milestones and other questions of finance.

Filterable reports allow the user to get from the project list into the individual projects concerned, e.g. in the case of red traffic lights. This will give you an insight into the reasons for the comment (see red arrows in the graphic).

With such an integrated solution for multi-project and portfolio management, you can present the important information to people in the project portfolio meeting who have little time and inform them well.

Who Should Participate in the Portfolio Meeting?

Who exactly participates in the meetings depends on the objectives of the meeting and the requirements of the organization. And here is what you should bear in mind:

• Decision-makers need to be present or represented by somebody.
• Keep the list of regular participants the same. The PMO should be familiar with their expectations.
• As required, you can invite additional participants periodically to discuss particular subjects.
• The regular participants need to have time to make the meeting and be prepared.
• In many cases, inclusion in the meeting is also regarded as a status symbol in the company.

Keep the group of participants rather small, no more than 5 to at most 10 people. If you invite people several times, it may become difficult to disinvite them later to return to the original size of the circle.

You should adjust the group of participants where necessary depending on the topics to be discussed. The smaller the company, the more likely it is that top management will be taking part as well. In larger companies, the heads of department are the more likely participants.

Participants for development projects could be as follows:

• PMO Manager
• Head of Development
• Head of Product Management
• Designated Team Leaders
• Representative of the Accounting Department

Participants for customer projects could be as follows:

• Head of the Customer Projects Department
• Head of Sales

What Is the Right Cadence for Project Portfolio Meetings?

The project portfolio meeting has to occur on a regular cadence, which is specified by the PMO.

In most cases, the employees will report their actual hours at the end of the week. They will be the basis of the project managers’ weekly status meetings – which in turn provide the basis of the bi-weekly resource meetings between project managers and team leaders. This may be followed by the project portfolio meeting. Decisions that could not be made here need to follow in additional meetings directly after.

The rhythm is key! After all, this is the only way the team will get used to the regular procedure.

Not everything necessarily has to be decided at once.  Questions of resource planning in particular can only be decided sensibly if there is a sound basis. This is only the case at certain points in the cadence at which all necessary information for the resource decisions is available and up to date.

If requests for resources come in out of sync with the cadence, point out that the cadence should be respected and refer to the upcoming project portfolio meeting. In the context of that meeting, the relevant decisions will be made in a way that is sensible from the perspective of the entire project portfolio.

One of the most important responsibilities of the PMO is to ensure reliability in the context of the project portfolio meeting. Yet, this will only work in sync with the cadence. Please pay attention to the following important points:

• The project portfolio meetings have to take place regularly , as project managers and other stakeholders are dependent on the decisions.
• The cadence is subject to the requirements of the organization. The question is what could happen between 2 meetings – and the PMO should set the cadence accordingly.
• Plan the dates in advance for the whole year. This is the only way to raise awareness among the decision-makers that this is an obligatory meeting.

A survey in our webinar on project portfolio meetings in October 2020 (German-language) revealed that almost 50% of almost 100 participants hold monthly project portfolio meetings. However, as mentioned above, the best cadence depends on the individual need at your company.

What Form Should a Successful Agenda of the Project Portfolio Meeting Take?

The most important, urgent and interesting has to go into the agenda of the project portfolio meeting.   Roughly, this can include:

• Documentation of the participants and explanation of absences (obligatory meeting!)
• Status of project updates including the mention of project managers who have not updated their projects on time (as an educational measure) or the invitation of particularly successful project managers as an incentive for good performance
• Project completions with final report, successes and Lessons Learned
• Upcoming decisions in ongoing projects, depending on the type of projects – topics which the steering committee / project sponsor cannot decide
• Information on new projects: Project order with goals, deadlines, budget, project manager, resources
• Presentation of the resource situation with the resolution of resource overload and underload
• Publication of results with the selection of information, formulation and approval of the information for the staff

Make sure that at least the project managers, and possibly also the team leaders, will be informed about successes and important decisions from the meeting after every portfolio meeting (new projects, sales pipeline, great project statuses, hurdles overcome etc.). This will help prevent unchecked office grapevine.

The project portfolio meeting is where all decisions exceeding the competencies of the project managers, sponsors, steering committees and team leaders are made.

These could be:

• Announcement of project priorities
• Assignment of project managers
• Approval of projects or project stages as well as project budgets.
• Ending or stopping projects
• Postponing projects
• Authorization of changes in the scope
• Allocation of resources at project level
• Resolution of resource conflicts

How Do You Prepare a Project Portfolio Meeting Properly?

To keep your meeting as concise as possible and be able to address the key topics precisely, the preparation provides an important permanent task for the PMO.

To fulfil this task, you require the regular reports of the project managers resulting from their project work. It is your role as the PMO to ensure data quality and check this with the project managers if necessary. On this basis, you prepare the meeting taking into account any newly added projects and strategic questions.

If the project managers’ information procurement takes too long, it is also the task of the PMO to improve the environment by providing assistance (e.g. coaching, better tools and methods).

As a rule of thumb, the status update for average projects should not take project managers longer than 2-3 hours per project.

Description of the above illustration: Assuming the project portfolio meeting is on a Wednesday, there should be a meeting with the team leaders directly before to clarify the current resource situation. You need to make sure that progress reporting and time tracking have taken place the Friday before. On Monday, there will be a reminder to employees who are running late. Thereupon, the project managers update and check their projects. On Tuesday, project managers who are running late receive a reminder to perform their updates.

In any case, set an early date for the editorial deadline for the preparation of the meeting. This will prevent last-minute changes that could destroy your preparation. Those who deliver later are to be classed as tardy employees.

In a webinar held in October 2020, the participants responded as shown in the illustration below regarding the duration of their project portfolio meeting: the majority (almost 50%) responded that it took “2 hours” and 25% responded “1 hour”.

Combined with the survey above, it would appear that the majority of companies conduct one two-hour project portfolio meeting per month.

Central Project List and Elements of the Project Reports

A current project list is indispensable for a good project portfolio meeting. It consists of information from the individual project status reports.

The information from the project status reports in the multi-project environment should be automatically entered into the project list. From the list, you can create multi-project reports at the push of a button and exchange data with the ERP system, e.g. via SAP integration .

All of this is possible with the “ PPM Paradise ” for instance, which we described above.

The figure below shows what important pieces of information you should summarize in a project list.

Please note: numbers are only one element of the report. A second part that is particularly important is the project manager’s comment. This enables the PMO and the participants of the project portfolio meeting to better understand the classifications for the traffic lights etc. After all, different individuals can set these in very different ways (for you will find a difference here between experienced and inexperienced project managers).

Moreover, the column with the date on which the project data was last published / saved is central to make sure the data presented from each project is truly up to date.

What should you pay attention to, if you want to make sure the project list is up to date? A few tips for you:

• Check if all projects have been saved and published in the last two days.
• Is there a project order for all new projects?
• Is there a status report for all ongoing projects?
• Do all projects that have been completed have a final report?
• Has the baseline been set in all projects?
• Have all actual hours of the employees been approved?
• Are there milestones in the past which have not been updated?
• Are there tasks in the past which have not been updated?
• Are there resource assignments in the past which have not been updated?
• Have all generic resources for the next (6?) weeks been replaced by people?
• Is there no more resource overload in the next (3?) months?

Set a baseline at the beginning of the project. And create another baseline after each project portfolio meeting. This allows you to see the change from the last meeting. You will not need more than these two baselines.

As mentioned above, you should attach great importance to the editorial deadline to make sure the data for your presentation cannot be changed shortly beforehand by a tardy project manager’s update.

By historizing the project list after the editorial deadline, you freeze the respective status of your report for the project portfolio meeting and can always come back to it as required.

Use solutions that allow you to automatically create your reports in Excel, PowerPoint or Word in your corporate design. Thus, you make sure the logo is always in the same place and the colors are correct. What is more, the reports are easy to present and print and historize. In most cases, online tools are not as reliable for this purpose. Find a few examples of PMO Reports here .

What Are the Criteria for Projects that Should Be Discussed in the Meeting?

There are no universal criteria for the importance of projects. Possibilities for the selection could include:

• The decision-makers can set certain projects to “important” irrespective of measurable criteria requesting their discussion in every portfolio meeting.
• Generally all “red lights” projects and perhaps also randomly selected ones with a green light making it harder for project managers to easily “hide” behind the color of the traffic light.
• Projects with work or budget above a threshold or top 10.
• Top 10 and other 3-5 of each color (also possible to use as a reward for project managers, if they get to present their project before the board)
• Projects with a high risk assessment
• Projects with need for a decision
• Projects by certain project managers, with certain technologies, from certain sites …

Interesting information from customer projects could include:

Interesting information from product development projects could be:

Conclusion – Project Portfolio Meetings Are Key to Managing Your Multi-Project Landscape

In this article, you have learned what is relevant for a successful and regular project portfolio meeting. As the PMO, you will be successful if all participants perceive this meeting of yours as very valuable. This involves, for example

• Project portfolio meetings have to take place regularly and are obligatory meetings.
• Keep the group of participants rather small, no more than 5 to at most 10 people.
• In case of requests out of sync with the cadence, be sure to refer to the meeting cadence.
• In any case, set an early editorial deadline for the preparation of the meeting.
• Make sure you inform at least the project managers, and possibly also the team leaders, about successes and important decisions from the meeting.

One last tip: Make sure the participants give you feedback at the end of the project portfolio meeting. This is easiest with a star rating Anything below 4 stars has to be explained. Such a rating gives you the opportunity to improve with a clear end in mind. On the other hand, good feedback gathered over time provides an important basis if you have to give proof of the PMO’s benefits. Should anyone question the purpose of your PMO, many good ratings will help you demonstrate how satisfied the stakeholders have been with your work so far. Hence, the PMO cannot be useless.

The project portfolio meeting is your chance to shine as the PMO enabling you to increase acceptance considerably. Good speed!

What are your tips for better project portfolio meetings? We look forward to receiving your comment below.

After many years as a development engineer in the automotive and energy sectors, Johann Strasser spent a decade as an independent trainer and consultant in the field of project management. During his tenure, he also served as project manager for software projects in the construction industry and provided scheduling and cost management support for large-scale construction projects. At TPG, he applies his expertise in product development and consulting services for international clients. His special focus is on PMO , project portfolios, hybrid project management , and resource management. For many years now, he has shared his knowledge through presentations, seminars, articles, and webinars.

Read more about Johann Strasser on LinkedIn and XING.

After earning his engineering degree in environmental technology, he gained many years of experience in project management through his work at an engineering office, an equipment manufacturer, and a multimedia agency. Achim Schmidt-Sibeth and his team have been responsible for marketing and communication at TPG The Project Group for many years now.

Read more about Achim Schmidt-Sibeth on  LinkedIn  or  XING

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Download Project Portfolio Summary Template

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This project portfolio template provides spreadsheet and dashboard views, as well as space to summarize details about specific projects and the overall health of your portfolio or project program . The spreadsheet includes columns for a project’s health ratings, priority, status, summary description, budget, progress, and risks. 

Record the outcomes of any cost benefit analysis, and note any links or attachments associated with a given project. The dashboard display offers a snapshot of budgeted costs versus actual spending, as well as the distribution of projects across the health, status, and priority categories.

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Project Portfolio Scorecard Template

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Microsoft Excel | Smartsheet

Evaluate projects in your portfolio with this simple spreadsheet template. The project management office (PMO) section at the top of the template provides a summary review of your portfolio’s progress and costs, as well as room for notes on the risks and cost benefit analysis. 

The template also includes a section for details about each project in the portfolio, with  categories for the priority, status, planned versus actual costs, hours, and quality index rating. This template includes example commentary that illustrates how portfolio managers can use the template to expand on the numerical data.

Project Portfolio Dashboard Template

Download Project Portfolio Dashboard Template — Microsoft Excel

Get a visual overview of portfolio KPIs with this Excel dashboard template, which includes a Gantt chart that shows the delivery timeline for each project, a pie chart that displays the portfolio’s resource allocation, and bar charts that analyze each project’s financials. 

The bar charts also include categories for risk analysis and open or pending actions. The project portfolio report section summarizes each project’s schedule, budget, issues, and other details in a spreadsheet format.

Project Portfolio Timeline Template

Download Project Portfolio Timeline Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets | Smartsheet

This project portfolio planning template provides a visual timeline for multiple projects. The Gantt chart timeline allows you to easily differentiate between projects, and the template automatically generates each bar on the chart based on your start and end dates. 

The template also includes columns for notes on the schedule, budget, resources, risks, and issues for each project in your portfolio. Make strategic plans based on delivery timelines and ongoing performance.

PowerPoint Project Portfolio Template

Download PowerPoint Project Portfolio Template — Microsoft PPT

Create an in-depth project portfolio dashboard in PowerPoint. Template slides include the portfolio’s timeline, resource allocation, financial status, risk analysis, issues, and pending actions. There is also a slide that displays the duration of each project in days.

The template also includes a table for compiling notes on each project. This thorough presentation template provides a broad overview of your portfolio as well as specific details about individual projects, and also includes sample data to illustrate the charts and graphs in each slide.

Project Portfolio Tracker Template

Download Project Portfolio Tracker Template

Track multiple projects with this combined spreadsheet and timeline template. You’ll find two tabs: an example template with color-coded options to highlight a project’s status, priority, itemized costs and hours, duration, and timeline; and a blank template for easy data entry. 

This tracker template divides each project into activities or phases, with columns for assigned owners, deliverables, and percent complete. The timeline provides a weekly schedule based on the start date you enter at the top of the template. Add or remove columns to create a customized template based on the project information you want to track.

Project Portfolio Budget Tracking Template

Download Project Portfolio Budget Tracking Template — Microsoft Excel

For each project in your portfolio, this budget tracking template provides a detailed breakdown of the costs, budgeted expenses, actual spending, and outstanding balance. Use the built-in  Gantt chart for visual tracking and to summarize each project’s budget versus actual costs. 

This template calculates subtotals and total costs as shown in the example template tab. The template also lists the status as well as planned and actual start dates for each project phase.

Project Portfolio Roadmap Template

Download Project Portfolio Roadmap Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets

Create a portfolio roadmap with milestone markers and color-coded bars that indicate a project’s status: finished, in progress, scheduled, or proposed. The roadmap format makes it easy to manage a large portfolio, and offers clear timelines and visual status levels.

The roadmap displays quarters and years and lists start and end dates next to each project name.

Project Portfolio Status Report Template

Download Project Portfolio Status Report Template

This status template simplifies reporting with a 12-month roadmap, status summaries, and details on each individual project. The portfolio status overview uses green, yellow, and red to indicate whether items are on track, show signs of potential issues, or are otherwise of concern. 

The financial summary calculates budgeted costs, actual costs, a financial forecast, and variance. This PMO project portfolio template also lists individual project status updates, including time frames, progress, and descriptions of risks or concerns.

What Is a Project Portfolio Management Template?

A project portfolio management template allows you to evaluate, choose, and prioritize projects in order to maximize performance and meet organizational goals. The template may include one or more portfolios. 

You can use a PPM template to efficiently evaluate the benefits and risks associated with multiple projects (and possibly multiple portfolios). These templates also enable you to ensure that you’ve aligned your projects with overall business objectives. PPM templates support the process of prioritizing, scheduling, and tracking multiple projects, so you can use an organized, metric-driven approach when making strategic decisions. 

For a comprehensive look at the project portfolio management process, including additional templates (such as a project risk analysis) and PPM for IT projects, check out “Project Portfolio Management 101: Processes, Tools, and Examples.”

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Why Your Team Needs a Project Management Board and Ways to Use It

Discover how to use project management boards to organize tasks and activities, the types available, and how Motion can help make managing them more efficient.

Project management can sometimes feel like juggling spinning plates on sticks. Your eyes are on several plates at once, preventing them from falling and breaking the entire structure. But it doesn't have to feel that way!

By incorporating project management boards into your work, you can stop trying to keep all the plates of your complex projects spinning. Take a seat and manage everything with your entire team from a trusty and customized project management board.

Curious to find out how you can get started optimizing your work with project management boards? Great! In this article you'll get answers to these questions:

What is a project management board?

• What are the purpose and benefits of using one?
• Who is in charge of creating and maintaining them?
• What types of project management boards are there and how can you optimize them with AI and Motion?

At the end of this guide you’ll have a clear idea of how to move forward with project management boards to be more efficient and productive. Project success is at your fingertips.

A project management board is a visual organizational tool that displays and tracks the progress of every task necessary to complete a project. It’s sometimes also called a project board.

Project management boards support business owners, project managers and teams during every stage of a project lifecycle, starting with project initiation activities to validating deliverables and everything in between.

Project management boards are available in different styles – Kanban, Gantt, the classic calendar, and even a portfolio view. The ideal project management board has all these views available in one platform, allowing you to switch from one to another according to your needs and preferences.

Benefits of using a project management board

There are several benefits to using a project management board with your team or on your own.

Visualizes progress

Most importantly, they offer a high-level overview of project progress, letting you know the status of one or more projects at all times. In more detail, project management boards can show what tasks are completed, which ones still need doing, and which are stuck.

Project management boards help stakeholders get a clear view of a project's progress, what milestones are met, and what deliverables are completed.

Encourages real-time updates

Using project management boards to manage a team encourages real-time updates that, in turn, help with quick issue spotting and easier problem solving. Having everything at a glance lets you know where you need to reallocate resources or move things around to be more efficient and finish the project on time.

Improves transparency in the workspace

Finally, using project management boards with your team creates transparency which inspires team collaboration and heightened employee accountability. When employees feel comfortable with the tools they’re using, they’ll be more productive and engaged in the process.

What's the purpose of a project management board?

Project management boards can help plan, assign, track, prioritize and manage tasks and activities for a project. Let’s dive into more details on those.

Plan, assign, track and manage

The number one purpose for using a project management board is to visually track and manage the progress of tasks.

The board can also be used to plan and assign those tasks and show their status. You can tell at a glance which are progressing well, and which might be stuck, enabling you to take timely corrective action.

For example, imagine you’re managing a website project with a team of developers and designers. There are many small tasks to finish before shipping the final product. You can define and assign tasks for that project, and then track progress as your team works through those tasks.

Prioritize tasks and activities

With a project management board, you can assign priorities and deadlines to the tasks. Plus, you can separate it all into phases or stages, guaranteeing that everyone on the team knows what they need to do, when and in what order.

Kanban boards, for example, help separate activities into stages that direct the flow of work for a team. For a web design project, the phases might be: To Do, In Process and Done. Or by priority – high, medium and low. A more detailed Kanban board could include customized column headers like, Wireframing, Prototyping, Development, and Launch.

Manage multiple projects

Project management boards can also be used to display the status of multiple projects. That’s a portfolio view. With a portfolio view, you could display key performance indicators (KPIs), such as schedule and cost performance, for multiple projects.

Types of project management boards

Project management boards (and what they can show) aren’t one size fits all. Short projects are easy to manage with simple physical boards and Post Its, but bigger projects would benefit from online project management boards.

Also important to consider, projects with alot of stakeholders will need dashboards with different views to show progress at different levels. For example, managers might only need a high level view, but the team will need more details in order to do and track their work.

There are several types and styles of project management boards. In the list below we share the most common. Select the project management board that best meets your and your team’s needs and how you like to work

Kanban Board

Kanban boards consist of columns you can customize with categories that make sense for the project you’re working on. Each column contains the tasks and activities related to these categories (status, owner, project phase, and the like) in a list organized by priority or deadline.

Activities and tasks in  Kanban  exist as “cards” that hold key information, like the assigned person, the deadline, priority, and dependent subtasks. Typically, the cards move from left to right, from start to finish. Cards can be dragged across lanes or can be triggered to move by changing the status or category label.

Project / Task Lists

In a project or task list you can see the projects or tasks along with their status, assignee and deadline. Lists of projects can show the status and performance indicators for a portfolio of projects. Task lists are comprehensive views of the tasks for a given project. When you have many projects going on at the same time, it’s good to have a tool that can show both portfolio and project views, while keeping the data clear and organized.

Gantt Chart

Gantt charts  are visual representations of the sequence of activities and their expected timelines. Visually, they look a lot like horizontal bar charts, with a column at the left showing task names. Along the top is a timeeline. The length of each bar shows the duration of the task, and its position under the timeline shows when it’s due.

Some Gantt chart tools show you assigned resources, task dependencies and allow you to use colors to highlight certain tasks. This makes it easy to understand the progress of a project against the plan.

Dashboards display performance for one project or multiple projects at once. Static dashboards highlight a moment in time. More advanced dashboards have auto-updating capabilities, which can send out up-to-date status reports.

Project dashboards can track progress, performance, and roadblocks at the same time. Having this information at your fingertips can help you pinpoint issues quickly by highlighting weak areas in the process.

Many project management board have dashboards already built in.

Roadmaps are high-level visual timelines that highlight milestones and expected outcomes by project phase or stages. A roadmap can be creative and fun, or it can be simple and to the point. Both styles can help stakeholders understand where the project stands and what's still ahead.

Calendars can also be used as project management boards. Tasks, activities, meetings and check-ins can all be organized together in one space.

For example, Motion offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use calendar view to track your and your team’s tasks.

‎Even better, using AI and machine learning technology, Motion can manage your and your team’s calendars to get the most important work done on time. Tasks are scheduled into calendar time slots based on priorities and deadlines.

Optimize all your project management activities with Motion

Sometimes team members never get used to a project management board and don't use it, wasting all the time you put into creating the board. Using Motion with your team simplifies a lot of the manual tasks that individuals would usually have to do.

The team members’ calendars are synched up to Motion so there’s no back-and-forth to check for conflicts or overlap. The AI in Motion schedules meetings at times that suit everyone according to their schedule. Team members will keep returning to Motion because it’s so much easier to keep track of absolutely everything.

Priorities change, urgent meetings come up. No matter, Motion knows what to do. It can reshuffle schedules within the constraints you give it.

In the tasks view below you can see how the most immediate and important tasks come next.

Motion offers solutions for both individuals and teams. Use Motion to manage your entire life or use it to manage the projects you're working on. Mix it all together and never have a personal and work schedule conflict again. Use the Google and Outlook calendar integration to keep all calendars aligned.

In Motion, you have several working views, tools and resources to help you and your team work more efficiently and get things done on time.

Get started on an AI-powered project management board and calendar with  Motion .

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Integrated Project Portfolio Management

A Guide to Project Portfolio Management With Monday.com

A team without a shared strategic goal is useless as a compass without a north arrow. This directional alignment can only be achieved with a clear project portfolio management (PPM) plan. So, what is project portfolio management ?

Learning to manage your project portfolio is an essential skill that defines a company’s goals and values. It maintains this plan by strategically aligning projects to enhance its ventures. Proper portfolio management counters waste by aligning resources and tracking the organization’s results.

We will break down the benefits of a project portfolio management platform and show how Monday.com ’s resource management can fit your plan.

What is Project Portfolio Management?

Monday.com is already famous as a tool for project management , but it can do much more. Project management allows teams to accomplish objectives in accordance with the project acceptance criteria within predetermined boundaries. With project portfolio management software, you can monitor projects’ progress. 

Project portfolio management is essential for a program manager . With effective PPM software, you can execute multiple projects with finite resources. 

What Is Resource Management?

Monday.com offers limited resources in the field of resource management. With the proper structure, you can ensure that your projects are properly staffed. 

Managers must learn how to allocate their resources and teams to different projects with a fixed amount of company resources. Planning, scheduling, and allocating people, money, and technology to a project or program are part of proper resource management.

Managers need to practice resource-leveling when resources are over-allocated or stretched too thin. This is a project management technique that ensures all projects are properly staffed. 

With limited access to resources, proper resource management software is essential. Effective resource management tools should be your priority to ensure that all teams can execute their projects.  

Defining Your Project Portfolio Management Strategy

Project managers need to use their insights to define their project portfolio strategy . By having a robust understanding of each step of a project, they can develop a clear and cohesive timeline and delegate aspects of the project. 

Project portfolio management lets organizations effectively prioritize schedules and plan their activities. Monday.com’s platform allows you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your team. This gives you a holistic overview of individual projects and your team’s progress.

Identify Your Overall Goals and Objectives

Goals give us direction  when it comes to completing a task. By taking the time to identify your goals, you can focus on high-priority elements and work toward your end product . 

Without setting clear goals and objectives, your team risks losing focus and getting off track. When you keep your projects’ goals and objectives in the forefront of your mind, you can ensure that you maximize your time and resources. 

Make a List of All Tasks Associated with the Project 

When your team takes on a large project, list all the tasks that go into your end goal. By isolating individual tasks, you can delegate smaller tasks to different teammates. 

Make a list of tasks associated with the project at the start of your project management journey. This allows you and your team to ensure no steps are overlooked when working towards your end goal.

Identify Strengths and Weaknesses for Projects

Once you and your team can review a comprehensive list of tasks associated with your project, you can help delegate them based on your team’s strengths and weaknesses. For example, if one of your teammates is extremely creative but struggles at copywriting or editing, you can give them all the digital design elements of the project. 

By identifying your team’s strengths and weaknesses, you can ensure that each element of your project is completed by someone who will complete their assigned task effectively. From a managerial perspective, you should create an environment where teams feel as if they can share their strengths and weaknesses to build upon one another.

If you fail to identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses, you may have someone working on a project element incorrectly and get your entire team off of your projected timeline. 

Draw Parallels Between Your Tasks and Objectives 

Team members want to know whether their work will fill a greater vision. By drawing parallels between each task and your overall objectives, you can empower your team to accomplish their mission.

Not only does drawing parallels between tasks in your objectives give people a sense of fulfillment, but it also allows you to ensure that all of your objectives are met. When managers don’t take a holistic approach to their projects, they hone in on certain objectives and focus on ones that they deem more important.

Filter Tasks Based on Your Priorities

Task filtration gives you the ability to narrow your task list by priority. Placing filters on your tasks will allow you to ensure a high level of performance among your team. 

Tasks are stacked together like dominoes when working on a major project. One task may need to be completed to begin another. That is why the sorting features on Monday.com allow you to sort through different tasks and rank them in order of priority.

When people work without this pre-determined list of priorities, they may neglect the most pressing tasks to get simpler ones off their to-do list.

Consistently Track Task Progress

Teams struggle to achieve their goals when they fail to track their overall progress. If you lose sight of your objectives, you will likely miss deadlines or overextend your resources. Project managers can help keep up-to-date by monitoring the Monday.com dashboard and incorporating “update meetings” into the calendar.

Manage Your Project Portfolio Using Monday.com

Portfolio management  is the maintenance of different projects and investments that balance an organization’s potential risks and rewards. It is called a portfolio when managers restructure and change how they approach their initiatives. 

Use a Management Platform to Track Your Project Portfolio’s Performance

A project manager ’s portfolio shows their ability to allocate resources, complete tasks promptly, and provide direction to their team. Projects completed using Monday.com can be reviewed and tracked easily, making them the perfect addition to a project manager’s portfolio. 

Project managers often juggle a variety of projects simultaneously. By leveraging PPM software and custom dashboards, Monday.com allows you to build your project management portfolio in a  centralized location .

What is the Difference Between Project Management and Portfolio Management? 

Portfolio project management focuses on how companies select projects, whereas project management refers to how tasks are divided up among a team. Because project management focuses on the execution of the project, it can become convoluted if not appropriately handled. 

Monday.com has features that allow you to manage projects and your portfolio effectively. Company leadership tends to fail when they attempt to merge project and portfolio management. 

How PPM Express Empowers Your Monday.com Project Portfolio Management

Monday.com is a premier platform for effective project portfolio management. However, PPM Express lets you build Roadmaps for  your Monday.com  portfolio.  This site allows you to scale your project management by leveraging digital systems and integration. 

When you connect your boards on Monday.com to PPM Express, you can use the high-level project portfolio visibility to make insightful decisions based on valuable PPM insights. Some helpful PPM Express features include: 

• Monday.com board organization 
• Project tracking
• Budget management tools
• Editing requests 

With PPM Express, you can manage all enterprise initiatives at scale, prioritize certain projects, and allocate resources effectively. Because you can upload and import all the details of your projects, managers can quickly review a problem and find a resolution.  Using this software, you can support your decision-making with insights from over 70 state-of-the-art Microsoft Power BI reports for Project Portfolio Management. Information can be shared with customers or external users.

Use Best Practices for Project Management and Project Portfolio Management

Managers are expected to juggle a slew of tasks at any given time. People often feel overwhelmed by a long “to-do list.” These overwhelming tasks are made easier with PPM software like Monday.com. 

Managers fail when they overextend their teams. You can increase your opportunities for success by prioritizing effective resource management. Integrating a project management platform will help your business.

These tools help your company’s business model identify strengths and weaknesses. 

Contact us at PPM Express  to help you manage your project portfolio and individual projects. 

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Knowledge Base

Create and add to portfolio boards, before you start, feature limits, create a portfolio board.

• Click ... More in Teamwork.com's main navigation menu.
• Select  Planning from the pop-out menu.  You might find Planning pinned to the main navigation menu.

• Click  + Add Board .
• Name the new Portfolio board.  Pick something that reflects the purpose of the board, such as "Client Projects."

• Set a board description.  Again, this is optional but can provide your team with key context as to the board's purpose.
• Click  Add board to save your new board.

Create a private Portfolio board

• Click the  Portfolio tab.
• Click + Add board .
• Select the  People  tab in the board creation / edit window.
• In the People  subsection, select the checkbox beside each individual user who (or entire company whose members) should be able to see the board. You can do the same for teams in the  Teams tab.  📝 You can only select people who already have permission to view Portfolio boards. Selecting a team or company automatically selects all of its members who have permission to view Portfolio boards.
• Click  Add board .

Create Portfolio board columns

• Switch to the  Portfolio tab.
• Click  + Add Column .
• Add a column name.
• Click  Save  to add the column to your Portfolio board.

Add a project to a Portfolio board

• Click  ...More  in Teamwork.com's main navigation menu.
• Select  Planning  from the pop-out menu.  You might find Planning pinned to the main navigation menu.
• Switch to the  Portfolio  tab.
• Click a board name to view it.
• Click  Show backlog in the view's top left.
• Find the relevant project in the backlog list.  Psst! You can search for and filter projects in the backlog to find what you're looking for.

Move or remove projects from Portfolio board columns

• Go to the  Portfolio tab.
• Scroll to the relevant column.
• Move a project between columns: Click and hold a project card, then drag and drop it to another column in the board.

Another option...

• From a project's Dashboard  tab:
• Find the project details panel on the Dashboard's left.
• Hover over the  Board Columns  section and click  Manage .
• Click an existing board column and select another column from the dropdown or choose  Remove from board .
• From the List  tab in the Projects  area:
• Make sure the Board column is toggled on.
• Scroll to the relevant project row.
• Click the project's existing board column. 
• Select another column from the dropdown or choose  Remove from this board .  📝 Projects on multiple boards display the column associated with the board the project was most recently added to. Click  Manage in the dropdown to update the project's columns in other boards.

Best practices

• Organize : Create Portfolio boards to group projects to suit how your company manages client work, then create columns to support the different phases of your workflow.
• Create custom views : Projects can exist in multiple boards at once, meaning you can easily reflect different processes for each project. For example, you have a board for each client's projects, with columns for progress phases. You could also create a board for a combined view of all of your company's projects.
• Automate : Use triggers to automatically update a project's properties when the project card is moved to a particular Portfolio board column.

Get in Touch

• Slacker Manifesto

The Project Portfolio Kanban Story: Better Board

When applying Kanban on project portfolio level you’re dealing with different challenges than in case of standard Kanban implementation on a team level (if there even is such a thing). Both the flow dynamics and task granularity is very different, thus you need to focus on different aspects when designing Kanban board.

This is basically why typical Kanban board design will often be suboptimal.

At the same time the biggest challenge you face on project portfolio level is defining and applying WIP limits . For the time being my thoughts on a subject are that depending on a specific environment teams would be choosing very different measures to manage WIP on portfolio level. However, as we as a community still lack experience from addressing different scenarios I’ll focus on the path I’m following. After all the story format I chose requires that.

In my case the most reasonable thing I was able to come up with was a number of people involved in project work. Unfortunately the scale of the team (more than 130 people) didn’t allow me to use straightforward approach and scale up WIP limits with numbers.

Instead of continuing my struggle to find a perfect measure that suits the current board I decided to redesign it completely.

Whenever you read about Kanban you learn that it is an evolutionary approach. Kaizen and all the stuff. However one advice I have on designing a Kanban board in general is that when you start running circles with board evolution and see little or no improvements throw the whole board out and start from scratch. From one point of view it can be considered a revolution (kaikaku) but from another: you don’t really change your way of working, you just try to visualize it differently.

Either way I took my own advice and started from a clean whiteboard. I also remembered another advice: not to stick to standard board designs . This is what I ended up with.

First, there is no value stream or process in a way we understand it on a team level. Since the flow of index cards wasn’t dynamic I decided this isn’t information I should focus on that much.

Second, on horizontal axis, instead of process there is a time line (monthly granularity). As variability of project sizes is huge I decided I need some sort of time boxes which I measure WIP against. With very few small engagements, ones that take us less than a few weeks, monthly time boxes looked reasonable.

Third, I created swim lanes for teams. We don’t have 130 generic engineers, or Average Full-Time Equivalents, or whatever other inhumane label you can think of. We have teams that we strive to protect and teams do have specializations. It means the context of a team is very important and if it is important it goes to the board, thus swim lanes.

Fourth, having such board construction I had to change my approach to index cards. Instead of having a single index card representing single project I ended up with territory-driven approach. A project covers a territory both in terms of team(s) and time. Looking at index cards with a project name you can instantly guess which team is working on the project and how long it’s going to take them. And the best part: a size of index card in any given month represents roughly how big part of a team would be involved in work on a project. This way we can easily show a few smaller projects as well as on big or any combination of those two.

Fifth, as one of Kanban base concepts is pull it is represented by backlog area – green cards on the left side of the board. These are projects that aren’t yet started. The specific swim lane they are neighboring show preferable team to work on a project. However, it rarely is such a direct dependency: this team will do the project as there is no other one suitable to do the job. Most of the time we assume that another team can build the project too. Each time a project goes into development we decide, at last responsible moment, which team will take it.

Of course there are some nice additional flavors here as well. Violet and yellow index cards differentiate maintenance projects from new ones. Green card are for projects that aren’t yet started and once they are we switch to yellow. Red index cards represent overrun in projects that are late. As we work on fixed price, fixed time projects we roughly know up front how much time and people we want to invest into a project. When something bad happens and this plan changes we show that. After all we put more attention to challenged projects.

A simple fact that we are working on fixed time, fixed price projects doesn’t mean our arrangements never change. They do. Any time something changes we just update it on the board, same as we’d do with any other board. We just keep the board updated as other way its value would diminish.

This Kanban board design definitely tells more than the initial one but I started this whole revolution to deal with WIP limits. What with them?

Well, there still aren’t explicit WIP limits. However at this moment there are implicit WIP limits and information about them can be pretty easily extracted. Considering that I use territory-driven approach to index cards WIP limit is show by vertical axis of the board. Each team has a limit of one full-sized sticky note (representing whole team) per month which can be split in any way.

In other words we won’t start another project unless there’s some white space that this project would fit into as white space represents our spare capabilities. Actually, it may be a bit of simplification as on rare occasions there are project we just start, no matter what. But even then we either can make such project fit the white space in a reasonable way or we need to make some more white space for it.

Even though such WIP limits aren’t explicit, after some time of working with the board I can tell you they do the job. They do, not only in pulling new projects into development but also, and more importantly, in long-term planning as we have visibility a year ahead and can confront our capabilities with planned sales etc.

With this board, for the first time from the beginning of my journey with project portfolio Kanban I felt satisfied.

See how we come up to this point – read the whole story .

21 comments… add one

Interesting change. But there’s something unusual (at least in my environment): your teams are separated static teams, aren’t they? Often in our projects, we take some people with skill A, some people with skill B,… to form a new team. Does that affect how we use this diagram?

Thanks for the food for thought, Paweł. As always with boards, I’m somewhat concerned about scalability. One question – how’s this information accessible to others, i.e. what’s the physical availability of this board in your case. Any reflections on this?

“At the same time the biggest challenge you face on project portfolio level is defining and applying WIP limits.” Enlightenment ensues. Thanks!

@Le Do Hoang Long – Teams are sort of static. I mean I see huge value of maintaining stable teams, where people can integrate with each other and they have a leader who can guide their growth as professionals. However, since we are working mostly on custom projects we often adjust teams to a current situation, moving people between teams (either temporary or permanently), temporary making one team a sub-team of another etc.

It may happen that one third or even more of a team is working with different teams on different projects. We even have a “project” named “Loans” which we use when significant part of the team is working with different teams.

I can think of a similar design with a completely ad-hoc project teams although in such case swim lanes would be changing pretty often. It might be a better idea to rethink the design of the board in this case as you don’t want to redesign the board too often.

BTW: How many projects you work on concurrently?

@Lech – This is actually the discussion I had the other day on Twitter. It boils down to this:

* You can only have that many items on the board and still keep it useful. Beyond that there’s information overflow and board can’t be comprehended by a single person, thus it loses its value.

* Given that you keep items on the board of the same size, the bigger the team, the more items you have on the board.

* It means that scalability of the board requires moving to more coarse-grained items from time to time, thus I don’t have features of a specific project on project portfolio board and just the projects themselves.

* Moving to more coarse-grained information also means that some people won’t be interested in information from the board anymore. For example a developer who is working on a single project for a year won’t need information on every project built by the organization on a daily basis. With different levels of the board you have different “clients” for it.

In my case board’s implementation is on a physical whiteboard on wheels which most of the time is placed in a hall, next to kitchen and my room. It means that people heading to grab a coffee (or a coffee and me) pass by it. Since it is on wheels I can take it to my room, e.g. when we’re discussing future projects with execs, or roll it to the meeting room for weekly management meetings.

There are around 30 people who are (or should be) heavily interested in the board’s content (managers, PMs, sales people) but since it is accessible to everyone there’s no problem when someone just want to take a quick look what is happening in the whole organization.

@John – You’ve caught the most important message of this post. It took me about half of a year working with portfolio level Kanban to realize that.

Hi Pawel, often I have 2 projects in line: one small “main project” where I do the major job, one big “side-project” when I devotes as a part of a fairly big team.

In general, besides some big projects that the involved people must devote a long time for developing and maintaining (later, once in a while), our teams periodly switch people to fit the project purpose, or simply let potential developers learn new things. And I think it’s good for both: increasing the ‘bus number’, and gradually improve young developer skills.

@Le Do Hoang Long – With just 2 project I would likely go with different board design. Actually with 2 projects project portfolio management can pretty much happen in one’s head. In other words, I’d start with questioning whether you even need a tool on this level (but I don’t say I know the answer for this question).

I just kicked off a portfolio Kanban in my company using a standard board design. I had the executives holding Sharpies and index cards. What a wonderful sight to see!

Anyhow, your “better board” design is somewhat intriguing. In my case, we have 9 Scrums and 1 Kanban just within IT. We are also experimenting with some Scrumban for different areas of the business. Meanwhile, 1 index card on the portfolio board represents a project or epic and can be worked on my multiple teams. With your “better board” design, how do you handle projects/epics that hit more than one team?

@Stephanie – If more than a single team works on a project there are stickies with project name in two (or more) rows. This way we can also show that one team is only partly engaged in work on the project.

Hi Pawel – Have you tried the Portfolio Kanban board with months in reverse order and flow from left to right? I understand this might confuse calendar manufacturers but from a Kanban viewpoint I’m confused by right-to-left flow!

@Andy – It’s not right-to-left flow. The flow here is sort of obscure, but in general it goes from left (less advanced project phase) to right (more advanced project phase). Well, unless there is something here that I didn’t understand.

I mean if you took a snapshot at one point in time, and then another a month later, wouldn’t you expect the cards to have moved to the left? (I’m rather assuming that the left most column is “this month” – am I misinterpreting? Apologies if so.)

@Andy – Ah, now I understand. Indeed, with such an approach you move the index cards to the left. Or you leave them as they are, but you move “the current moment” marker to the right, which is almost the same.

Talking about flow-direction, although I most frequently use left-to-right flow, it’s not always the case. I guess I first started struggling with this approach when I dealt with non-homogeneous flow, which forced me to give on left-to-right flow as the only solution, so I don’t mind other approaches.

In this case, on one hand, I think the right-to-left calendar would be more confusing than sort of right-to-left flow. On the other if yous show time perspective (and I do) the further in time you are the more uncertainty you have, thus it makes sense to put it further to the right I think.

Basing on your comments I think that interesting tweak for that design could be resigning from long term planning perspective (or showing that from a very general perspective) and focusing instead only on the closest future, but showing the internal flow of features. Definitely an idea to remember – might be pretty useful in specific contexts of small-to-medium organizations.

Nice Job! But to be sincerely, This Kanban sounds a lot strange to me… looks much more like a Gannt than a self-management system. But if it works for you, that´s the purpose!

Is it possible to visualise dependencies between projects? I am trying to visualise a program of several projects. Some are fairly independent, but sometimes the output of one is necessary as an input for another. I don’t know how to visualise that on a Kanban board, so I keep on using a Gantt. Thanks.

@Stephan – There are two answers to that. In many contexts a total number of projects would be limited and thus few hard dependencies that you have will be fairly obvious for everyone interested. This means that there wouldn’t be any extra mechanism that you need to introduce to make people aware of the dependencies.

The other scenario is when there’s enough concurrent initiatives and interdependencies that you need to introduce something to have that visualized.

Depending on specific context I may think of different approaches: – rearranging the board so that specific, dependent projects are grouped together – using color coding to show initiatives that depend on each other – using additional markers to show which work needs to wait on other things to complete – etc.

After all Gantt chart does exactly that – it shows dependencies with lines.

Another approach that I can think of would be redesigning the whole portfolio board so that the main thing that is visualized are dependencies. I would go down that path if failing to manage dependencies properly was identified as the biggest issue in my current context.

As a rule of thumb: visualizing portfolio you may choose one main dimension that you show. It may be flow, capabilities, deadlines, etc. Depending on the dimension you would end up with different designs of the board. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j1L2lBXAnk for more on that.

This means that portfolio board tend to be very different one from the other. That’s actually perfectly OK.

Thanks for the quick reply. Great talk by the way. Lots of good ideas to start experimenting with …

I found very close interface here – Kanban Tool In case of our team most important is simplicity and usability.

Pawel, so 3 years later has me wondering, are you still using this approach?

One of the benefits (or drawbacks) of the traditional kanban setups is that there’s less worry over long term planning. With this approach each team needs to plan out their work/projects accordingly. How were teams tracking estimate changes (e.g. the horizontal axis)? How was the estimation process in general?

FYI, great Teal presentation at Agile2015 btw!

@Jason – Interestingly enough, despite my much deeper understanding of the challenges of portfolio visualization, I still use the same pattern for Portfolio Kanban board.

You may look at this article as a summary of some approaches to portfolio visualization as well as how the thinking behind the process has advanced.

You may also wait for videos from Lean Agile Scotland 2015 once they’re made available. In my session there I discussed the challenges of portfolio visualization. BTW: here are the slides .

The reason why the default pattern of my board hasn’t changed, even though I changed the workplace context, is that the most common issue on portfolio level is balancing capabilities with demand and, as a follow up to this one, over-commitment. The outcome is overburdened teams and inefficient and ineffective work. That’s why visualization strategy that focuses on available capabilities, ongoing commitments and demand (that part typically being more enhanced than in the example used in the post) is still one of the default options to consider.

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Hi, I’m Pawel.

I am Chief Cook and Bottle-Washer at Lunar Logic , a speaker, a coach and a trainer.

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Product Portfolio Management 101

The Basics of Managing a Product Portfolio

What is product portfolio management?   To put it simply, it’s a strategic approach employed by businesses to oversee and optimize their collection of products and services—known as their product portfolio . It involves evaluating and prioritizing the allocation of resources across various products to ensure alignment with organizational goals, market demands, and profitability objectives. Through this process, companies can make informed decisions regarding which products to develop, maintain, or retire, thus maximizing the overall product portfolio value and enhancing competitiveness in the market.

What Are the Objectives of Product Portfolio Management?

Proper product portfolio management aims to achieve the following.

Optimizing Resource Allocation

Product leaders must ensure that resources, including finances, manpower, and time, are allocated efficiently across the portfolio. This involves identifying which products or services offer the highest potential returns and strategically allocating resources to them. By optimizing resource allocation, companies can maximize their overall profitability and return on investment.

Alignment With Strategic Goals and Market Demands

The product portfolio needs to align with the company’s strategic goals and meet the demands of the market. This entails evaluating each product’s contribution to the company’s mission, vision, and long-term objectives. It also involves continuously monitoring market trends, customer preferences, and competitor actions to ensure that the portfolio remains relevant and competitive.

Risk Mitigation

Product portfolio management intends to mitigate risks by diversifying the portfolio and spreading investments across multiple products or services. By having a balanced portfolio that includes products at different stages of the product life cycle, in various market segments, or with different risk profiles, companies can reduce their exposure to market fluctuations, technological disruptions, and other uncertainties. This diversification strategy helps safeguard against potential losses and enhances the overall resilience of the business.

Capitalizing on Emerging Trends and Opportunities

It’s important to proactively identify emerging market trends, customer needs, and technological innovations. By keeping up with industry developments and conducting thorough market analysis, companies can identify new opportunities for growth and innovation. The objective here is to capitalize on these opportunities by either developing new products or adapting existing ones to meet evolving market demands, thus maintaining a competitive edge and driving sustainable business growth.

Fostering Innovation and Growth

By investing in research and development, exploring new technologies, and encouraging a culture of creativity and experimentation, companies can continuously innovate their offerings. This goal is to introduce novel products or features that address unmet customer needs, disrupt existing markets, or create entirely new market segments. Through strategic portfolio management, companies can nurture a pipeline of innovative products that fuel future growth and ensure long-term relevance.

Importance of Product Portfolio Management

This is a crucial strategy for businesses as it provides a holistic view of the entire product range, enabling strategic decision-making regarding resource allocation, investment prioritization, and market positioning. By supporting the outcomes above, product orgs can reap the following benefits that achieve sustainable growth:

• Cost Effectiveness: Maximize profitability, minimize time on poor-performing features, and ensure that resources are directed towards initiatives that generate the highest returns—enhancing overall business performance.
• Resilience: Reduce exposure to individual product failures or market downturns with a diverse portfolio that spreads risk more evenly, making the business less vulnerable to external uncertainties and market disruptions.
• Agility: Maintain market relevance by making timely adjustments, introducing cutting-edge new products, modifying existing ones, or phasing out obsolete offerings through regular assessments of market trends and customer feedback.

Product Portfolio Management vs. Product Management

While product management focuses on the development and enhancement of individual products, product portfolio management considers the collective impact of all products in achieving organizational objectives. This ensures coherence, synergy, and sustained growth across the entire portfolio.

Elements of Product Portfolio Management

The key elements that make up any product portfolio management process include: 

• Portfolio Analysis: Evaluate the performance, potential, and strategic fit of each product.
• Portfolio Optimization: Reallocate resources to maximize portfolio value and mitigate risks.
• Portfolio Planning: Set clear objectives, priorities, and strategies for the portfolio.
• Portfolio Governance: Establish processes and mechanisms for decision-making, monitoring, and review.

Let’s dive deeper into what each of these phases require, and why they are important.

Portfolio Analysis

Performance assessment entails analyzing key metrics such as revenue growth, profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction to gauge the effectiveness of each product in delivering value to the organization. Potential assessment involves forecasting future market trends, technological advancements, and competitive dynamics to identify growth opportunities and assess each product’s growth potential. Strategic fit assessment examines how well each product aligns with the company’s overall strategic goals, market positioning, and competitive differentiation. 

By conducting comprehensive portfolio analysis, businesses can gain insights into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats associated with each product, enabling informed decision-making and resource allocation.

Portfolio Optimization

Maximizing overall value and mitigating risks involves identifying opportunities to enhance the performance of high-potential products through increased investment or strategic initiatives—while divesting resources from underperforming or low-potential products. Optimization strategies may include prioritizing resource allocation based on market demand, profitability potential, and strategic importance, as well as diversifying investments to spread risk across different products or market segments. 

By optimizing the allocation of resources, businesses can enhance overall portfolio performance, minimize vulnerabilities, and improve resilience in the face of market uncertainties.

Portfolio Planning

For product teams to manage their portfolio effectively, they must define strategic goals, target markets, and performance metrics to guide portfolio management decisions. This should be done with executive leadership to ensure buy-in. Objectives may include achieving revenue targets, market share growth, profitability improvement, or product innovation goals. Priorities involve identifying key focus areas or initiatives that are critical to achieving strategic objectives and allocating resources accordingly. Strategies may encompass product development, market expansion, portfolio diversification, or portfolio rationalization efforts aimed at optimizing the portfolio composition and maximizing value creation. 

By establishing a comprehensive portfolio plan, businesses can align portfolio management activities with strategic priorities and ensure effective execution.

Portfolio Governance

Now it’s time to ensure effective management and oversight of the portfolio. This includes defining roles, responsibilities, and the decision-makers, such as executive leadership, product managers, and cross-functional teams. Governance mechanisms may include regular portfolio reviews, performance tracking against key metrics, risk assessment and mitigation measures, and escalation protocols for addressing portfolio issues or challenges. 

By instituting robust portfolio governance practices, businesses can enhance transparency, accountability, and alignment across the organization, enabling timely decision-making, proactive risk management, and continuous improvement in portfolio performance.

Different Types of Product Portfolio Management

This process can take various forms depending on the organization’s industry, size, and objectives. Common types include: 

• Balanced: Maintain a diversified portfolio across different product categories or market segments.
• Strategic: Align the product portfolio with the company’s long-term strategic goals and competitive positioning.
• Innovation: Focus on nurturing and developing a pipeline of cutting-edge, exciting products to drive future growth and stand out amongst the competition.

No matter which focus your organization chooses, proper product portfolio management should enhance overall competitiveness and resilience in dynamic business environments. Let’s look into how to effectively execute on this strategic approach.

Strategies for Effective Product Portfolio Management

Crafting a winning product portfolio requires optimizing the composition, performance, and value of the portfolio. Strategies may include:

• Segmentation and Prioritization: Segment the product portfolio based on factors such as market segment, product life cycle stage, or strategic importance, while prioritizing resources based on each segment’s potential for growth and profitability.
• Portfolio Rationalization: Evaluate the portfolio to identify underperforming or redundant products and make decisions regarding product discontinuation or consolidation to streamline the portfolio and focus resources on high-value initiatives.
• New Product Development: Invest in research and development (R&D) to drive innovation and introduce new products or enhancements that address evolving market needs, technological advancements, or competitive threats.
• Market Expansion: Explore opportunities for market expansion by entering new geographic regions, customer segments, or distribution channels to diversify revenue streams and capitalize on untapped market potential.
• Portfolio Balancing: Maintain a balanced portfolio that includes a mix of products with different risk profiles, revenue streams, and growth potential to mitigate risk, maximize return on investment, and ensure long-term sustainability.

For more information, here are some tips on how to build a product portfolio .

Balancing the Product Portfolio

To achieve strategic objectives, optimize resource allocation, and mitigate risks, getting the right product mix is a critical part of your product portfolio management strategy.

• Product Diversification: Ensure a diverse mix of products across different market segments, product categories, and customer profiles to spread risk and minimize exposure to market fluctuations or competitive threats.
• Risk Management: Assess and manage risk across the portfolio by balancing investments in high-risk, high-reward opportunities with more stable, low-risk products to achieve a balanced risk-return profile.
• Lifecycle Management: Manage the product lifecycle by allocating resources dynamically based on each product’s stage of development, maturity, and decline, ensuring a steady pipeline of new products and revenue streams while optimizing the performance of existing offerings.
• Revenue Mix Optimization: Balance investments in products with different revenue generation models, such as one-time sales, subscription-based services, or recurring revenue streams, to maximize overall revenue and profitability.

Using Market Analysis for Product Portfolio Management

Market analysis plays a crucial role in informing decisions by providing insights into market trends, customer preferences, competitor actions, and industry dynamics. Strategies for using market analysis include:

• Market Segmentation: Segment the market based on factors such as demographics or behavioral patterns to identify distinct customer segments with unique needs and preferences, and tailoring the product portfolio to address each segment’s requirements.
• Competitive Analysis: Analyze competitors’ product offerings, pricing strategies, distribution channels, and market positioning to identify competitive strengths and weaknesses, uncover market opportunities, and inform product portfolio differentiation and positioning strategies.
• Market Opportunity Assessment: Evaluate market size, growth potential, and attractiveness in different market segments or geographic regions to prioritize investment opportunities, allocate resources effectively, and capitalize on emerging market trends and opportunities.
• Customer Feedback and Insights: Gather feedback from customers through surveys, interviews, or market research studies to understand their needs, preferences, pain points, and buying behavior; use these insights to inform product development, portfolio planning, and innovation strategies.

Applying Resource Allocation in Product Portfolio Management

As previously discussed, strategic resource allocation (time, manpower, and money) is a necessary aspect of product portfolio management. Some tips include:

• Portfolio Prioritization: Prioritize resources based on the strategic importance, revenue potential, growth prospects, and resource requirements of each product to ensure that resources are directed towards initiatives that deliver the greatest value and impact.
• Scenario Planning: Anticipate different scenarios and market conditions, such as best-case, worst-case, and most-likely scenarios. Develop contingency plans and resource allocation strategies to mitigate risks and capitalize on opportunities in each scenario.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Facilitate collaboration and communication among cross-functional teams—including executive leadership, product, marketing, sales, finance, and customer support—to ensure alignment of resource allocation decisions with strategic priorities, market realities, and business objectives.
• Performance Monitoring: Monitor the performance of each product against key metrics such as revenue, profitability, market share, customer satisfaction, and ROI. Use performance data to assess the effectiveness of resource allocation decisions and make adjustments as needed to optimize portfolio performance over time.

Tools and Techniques for Product Portfolio Management

The following frameworks help assess and manage a company’s product portfolio.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix

The BCG Matrix is used to analyze and manage a company’s portfolio of products based on their market growth rate and relative market share. Products are categorized into four quadrants: 

• Stars: High market share, high growth rate
• Question Marks: Low market share, high growth rate
• Cash Cows: High market share, low growth rate
• Pets: Low market share, low growth rate

The BCG Matrix helps businesses prioritize resource allocation by focusing on high-potential products (Stars and Question Marks) for investment, managing mature products (Cash Cows) for profitability, and considering removal or turnaround strategies for low-performing products (Pets).

The GE/McKinsey Matrix

The GE/McKinsey Matrix , also known as the Nine-Box Matrix, is used to assess and prioritize a company’s portfolio of products based on their attractiveness and competitive strength. Products are evaluated on two dimensions: 

• Industry Attractiveness: Market growth rate, market size, profitability
• Competitive Position: Market share, brand strength, technological leadership 

The matrix divides products or business units into nine cells, with each cell representing a strategic category such as Invest/Grow, Build/Protect, Harvest/Maintain, or Divest/Exit. The GE/McKinsey Matrix helps businesses make strategic decisions about resource allocation, investment prioritization, and portfolio management based on the relative attractiveness and competitive position of each product or business unit.

Portfolio analysis involves assessing and managing a company’s portfolio to optimize performance, minimize risk, and align with strategic objectives. This analysis typically includes evaluating factors such as market share, revenue growth, profitability, market dynamics, competitive positioning, and strategic fit. Techniques used in portfolio analysis may include SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), market segmentation analysis, trend analysis, scenario planning, and sensitivity analysis. 

Key Challenges in Product Portfolio Management

Adapting to market changes.

One of the primary challenges in product portfolio management is effectively adapting to rapidly changing market conditions. Markets evolve due to factors such as technological advancements, shifting consumer preferences, competitive actions, and regulatory changes. Ensuring that the product portfolio remains relevant and competitive in such dynamic environments requires continuous monitoring of market trends, customer feedback, and competitor actions. 

However, rapidly adapting to market changes while maintaining strategic alignment and portfolio coherence can be difficult. It requires agility, flexibility, and proactive decision-making.

Ensuring Consistent Product Innovation

Another challenge is ensuring consistent product innovation across the portfolio. Innovation is essential for driving growth, differentiation, and competitiveness in the market. But fostering a culture of innovation and executing successful innovation initiatives consistently can be tough. Innovation efforts may face obstacles such as resource constraints, risk aversion, internal resistance to change, and difficulty in translating ideas into commercially viable products. 

Moreover, sustaining a pipeline of innovative products requires a systematic approach to idea generation, prioritization, development, and commercialization, as well as effective collaboration across functional areas and organizational levels.

Managing Resources Across Multiple Products

Resources such as finances, manpower, and time are finite and must be allocated judiciously to maximize portfolio value and achieve strategic objectives. These resource allocation decisions can be complex, particularly when balancing competing priorities, managing dependencies, and optimizing resource utilization across diverse products with varying resource requirements and performance expectations. 

Inefficient resource allocation can lead to suboptimal outcomes, including missed opportunities, wasted resources, portfolio imbalance, and failed launches.

Importance of Technology in Product Portfolio Management

Software solutions automate and streamline various aspects of product portfolio management, facilitating more efficient and data-driven decision-making processes. Technology can offer functionalities for portfolio analysis, resource allocation, project management, collaboration, and reporting, among others. By centralizing portfolio data, providing real-time insights, and supporting collaboration across teams, leveraging technology can enable businesses to optimize portfolio performance, mitigate risks, and align investments with strategic objectives.

Key Features

It’s important to choose a purpose-build product management tool that can provide a holistic view of the entire product portfolio (and all of the feature ideas and customer feedback you have for it). Key features include:

• Product Hierarchy / Portfolio Dashboard: A comprehensive dashboard that provides an overview of the entire product portfolio, including key metrics, performance indicators, and status updates for each product or project. The dashboard should offer customizable views and filters to allow users to drill down into specific products, features, or initiatives as needed.
• Product Roadmap Visualization: Interactive product roadmap visualization capabilities that enable users to create and share dynamic roadmaps for the entire product portfolio. The roadmap should provide a clear timeline of planned initiatives, feature releases, and milestones, allowing stakeholders to understand the strategic direction and progress of the portfolio at a glance.
• Feature Management: Feature management functionality that allows users to capture, prioritize, and track feature ideas and requests across the product portfolio. This includes features for gathering customer feedback, voting on feature ideas, and categorizing features based on criteria such as priority, complexity, and feasibility.
• Ideation and Collaboration Tools: Built-in ideation and collaboration tools that facilitate brainstorming, idea generation, and collaboration among cross-functional teams. These tools should support capturing and categorizing feature ideas, facilitating discussions, and enabling collaboration on feature development and prioritization.
• Integration with Customer Feedback Channels: Seamless integration with customer feedback channels such as support tickets, surveys, user forums, and social media platforms. This integration allows product teams to capture, analyze, and prioritize customer feedback directly within the product management tool, ensuring that customer voices are heard and incorporated into product decisions.
• Analytics and Reporting: Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities that provide insights into portfolio performance, feature usage, customer satisfaction, and market trends. These analytics should enable data-driven decision-making by providing actionable insights into product performance, customer behavior, and competitive dynamics.
• Resource Allocation and Capacity Planning: Resource allocation and capacity planning features that enable users to allocate resources such as finances, manpower, and time across the product portfolio. This includes tools for tracking resource availability, capacity constraints, and resource utilization, as well as forecasting resource needs and optimizing resource allocation to maximize portfolio value.
• Customization and Flexibility: Features that allow users to tailor the product management tool to their specific needs, processes, and workflows. This includes customizable fields and views, as well as the ability to configure permissions and access controls to ensure security and compliance with organizational policies.
• Scalability and Performance: Considerations to ensure that the product management tool can accommodate the organization’s current and future needs as the product portfolio grows and evolves. This includes evaluating factors such as data storage capacity, user concurrency, system responsiveness, and uptime reliability to ensure a smooth and efficient user experience at scale.

Choosing the Right Product Portfolio Management Software

Viewing all the above features like a checklist, it’s important to confirm with leadership what features separate the necessary “must-haves” to the more desirable “would-be-nices”. Beyond that, you should also consider several factors to ensure that the chosen solution aligns with your specific needs, objectives, and constraints. Some key considerations include:

• Functionality: Assess the breadth and depth of features offered by the software to ensure that it meets requirements for portfolio analysis, resource allocation, collaboration, and reporting.
• Scalability: Evaluate the scalability of the software to accommodate your current and future portfolio management needs as your org grows and evolves.
• Usability: Consider the user interface, ease of use, and intuitiveness of the software to ensure adoption across your organization.
• Integration: Asses the software’s integration capabilities with other systems and tools already used within your org to ensure seamless data exchange and workflow integration.
• Customization: Evaluate the software’s flexibility and customization options to tailor the solution to your unique requirements, processes, and workflows.

Enterprise Product Portfolio Management

Enterprises in particular usually have multiple products to manage. Due to the scale, diversity, and strategic significance of their portfolios, enterprises have complex software needs for managing their product portfolio. Here’s an overview of the software requirements enterprises typically have for effective management:

Comprehensive Visibility

Enterprises require software that provides comprehensive visibility into their entire product portfolio, including all products, projects, and initiatives across different business units, geographies, and market segments. The software should offer customizable dashboards, reports, and visualizations that enable stakeholders to understand the composition, performance, and strategic alignment of the portfolio at a glance.

Advanced Analytics and Reporting

Enterprises need advanced analytics and reporting capabilities that provide actionable insights into portfolio performance, customer behavior and needs, and competitive dynamics. The software should offer sophisticated analytics tools, predictive modeling, and scenario analysis capabilities that enable data-driven decision-making and strategic planning.

Strategic Alignment and Decision Support

Their product management software should enable them to define and track strategic goals, objectives, and KPIs across the portfolio. The software should offer tools for scenario planning, feature prioritization, and risk assessment that help enterprises evaluate alternative strategies, prioritize investments, and mitigate risks effectively.

Cross-Functional Collaboration and Communication

The software should offer collaboration tools, discussion forums, and document sharing capabilities that enable seamless communication, knowledge sharing, and decision-making across geographically distributed teams and departments. All information should be accessible in one place, particularly customer feedback.

Integration with Enterprise Systems

The software must integrate seamlessly with other enterprise systems and tools used across the organization, such as ERP systems, CRM platforms, product and design collaboration tools (e.g., Figma, Miro), and product delivery and engineering tools like Jira. This can be done via APIs, connectors, and data integration capabilities that enable frictionless data exchange and workflow integration, ensuring consistency and accuracy of data across systems.

Customization and Scalability

Enterprises require a product portfolio management tool that is customizable and scalable to accommodate their unique needs, processes, and workflows, as well as support their growth and expansion plans. The software should offer flexibility to customize fields, views, and workflows, as well as scalability to handle large volumes of data and users without compromising performance or usability.

Security and Compliance

Enterprises must prioritize security and compliance with industry and global regulations. The software should offer robust access controls, encryption, data protection, and audit trail capabilities that safeguard sensitive information and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR.

Continuous Improvement and Support

Notorious for having multiple stakeholders and longer review processes, enterprises can move quicker when the software has regular updates, enhancements, and technical support services. The vendor should offer training, documentation, and customer support resources to help enterprises maximize the value of the software and address any issues or challenges that arise during implementation and usage.

Leverage Productboard for Product Portfolio Management 

As a scalable and agile product management system for large companies , Productboard provides all of the above key features and enterprise-ready requirements.

Productboard’s scalable and agile product management system provides the tools and functionalities required to effectively manage and optimize product portfolios, drive strategic alignment, and achieve business objectives.

360-Degree Portfolio View

Productboard’s flexible product hierarchy offers a complete view of your product portfolio and all associated feature ideas. You can organize feature ideas based on user needs, product areas, interfaces, or technical components. Break down large ideas into smaller subfeatures or group related features under a single idea. 

Prioritized features can be seamlessly pushed for delivery through integrations with Jira, Trello, and GitHub. This provides product managers with a better way to capture and visualize feature ideas, moving away from flat lists in spreadsheets or task management tools to gain a clearer perspective.

Roadmapping and Strategic Alignment

Without alignment, product managers may focus too much on features themselves rather than the outcomes they achieve. Effective teams set clear objectives that explain how features will benefit customers and the business:

• Help users with task X
• Expand to customer group Y
• Fill important feature gaps for user role Z

You can set these objectives in Productboard and use them to prioritize which features to work on next. Use the data-driven prioritization matrix to assess each feature’s value compared to the effort required. When sharing what’s coming next, group the visual product roadmap by objective to show why each feature is important. This shift from focusing on output to outcomes not only gives teammates better business context but also helps everyone see how their work contributes to the bigger picture.

Secure Feedback Collection and Sharing

Handling multiple products—including gathering feature ideas and customer feedback—is all done in one place. Multiple product teams can work together in the same Productboard project, focusing on the data most relevant to them. You can create different release groups to manage various teams’ schedules or separate groups for development planning and broader releases displayed on your company roadmap.

You can even loop in other stakeholders from different departments, inviting them to gain context (while keeping certain unnecessary data hidden to avoid confusion). Share your roadmap with the entire organization, validate ideas, or collect feedback—all while restricting access to sensitive information or tentative plans.

Interested? Request a demo or try Productboard for free .

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Forgot to get solar eclipse glasses? Here's how to DIY a viewer with household items

By now, everyone has heard that the rare 2024 total solar eclipse is coming – and it's got people excited.

While cities brace for traffic, schools brace for absences and space enthusiasts are planning parties, the glasses that enable safe viewing of the eclipse have become something of a hot commodity.

Peeking directly at the eclipse before it reaches totality without proper eye protection can cause permanent eye damage, experts have warned, making glasses a necessity for safe viewing. But, as the day approaches, they may become harder to find .

Luckily, people who didn't manage to get their hands on glasses are not completely down and out. There are other safe ways to view the eclipse, say experts, and a lot of them only require a little bit of craftiness and items you can find lying around the house.

Here are a few DIY eclipse viewers you can make at home.

As a reminder, none of these options allow you to look directly at the eclipse: you need special eclipse glasses for that.

Solar eclipse guide: When is the 2024 total solar eclipse? Your guide to glasses, forecast, where to watch.

NASA's DIY cereal box viewer

This NASA project uses components you almost certainly already have at home. Using a cereal box, cardboard, foil, paper, scissors and tape or glue, you can put together this projection eclipse viewer.

As always, NASA advises not to look directly into the sun using this tool.

Steps to make the cereal box eclipse viewer:

• Get an empty, clean cereal box.
• Cut a white piece of cardboard that will fit snuggly in the bottom of the box, or secure it permanently by gluing it in place.
• Cut the top of the cereal box, removing both ends and leaving the center intact.
• Put a piece of tape across the center of the top to securely hold it closed.
• Tape a piece of heavy-duty foil or double a single layer for additional strength, covering one of the openings at the top of the cereal box. The other opening will remain open for viewing.
• Using a small nail (approximately 3mm in diameter) push a hole in the foil.
• Cover the entire box with construction paper, leaving the single-viewing opening and the foil uncovered.

How to use the DIY viewer :

• The finished box should be held with the pin-hole side facing the sun. It may take a little practice pointing the box.
• With your back facing the sun, look through the viewing opening. A small image of the sun, about ½ cm in diameter can be seen projected on the white paper inside the box.

Watch the demo here:

The Planetary Society DIY paper viewer

While the Planetary Society also offers instructions for box or projector viewers that are more "fancy," as they put it, it doesn't get easier than their simple pinhole paper projector.

To make it, you only need two index cards (3-by-5 or A6 or A7 size) or small paper plates for each person and basic pushpins. Simply use the pushpin to punch a small hole close to the middle of one of the cards and you're done.

Another super easy version that requires no crafting? A kitchen colander. An ordinary kitchen colander can easily be used to view a solar eclipse in the same way as other projector viewers; the colander's circular holes project crescent images of the sun onto the ground.

To make the "fancier" version, you'll need 2 index cards (larger, 5-by-7 or A5 cards work better for this) or small paper plates for each person, a pencil, pushpins and a towel, sweatshirt, blanket, flattened corrugated cardboard box, carpet, or other soft substrate to place underneath card during pin pushing.

To make the fancier version:

• Draw a simple design on a card. The lines should not be too close together
• Place the card on top of something soft (blanket, towel, etc)
• Using the push pin, make small holes along your design lines. Not too close together – about 5 millimeters (1/4 inch) apart.

To use it, you'll again want to avoid looking directly at the sun:

• Go to your eclipse observing spot and make sure you can see the shadow of your head and shoulders clearly.
• Hold up the card with the hole on top of your shoulder so that you can see the shadow of the card above the shadow of your shoulder.
• Now hold up the other card and make sure you can see its shadow, too.
• Move the second card and watch how its shadow moves. Keeping the card in front of you, move its shadow until the second card's shadow overlaps the first card's shadow.
• Now look at the second card. You should see a dot on the card for every hole you punched. Those dots are actually images of the sun.

Cardboard or paper tube eclipse viewer

Sticking with the theme of using items you can easily find around the house, tube viewers can be made using cardboard tubes from household items like paper towels or toilet paper rolls. You can also use thick cardstock rolled up and taped to make your own tube.

To make one, you'll need a cardboard tube, white paper, aluminum foil, tape and a pushpin or something else sharp to poke a small hole. According to "Let's Talk Science," you can put this viewer together with these steps :

• Trace the opening of the tube on a piece of white paper. Draw a slightly bigger circle around it. Cut around the bigger circle. Cut small slits to the inner circle.
• Cut an opening near one end of the tube to make a viewing window.
• Tape the paper circle to the end of the tube near the viewing window.
• Cut a piece of aluminum foil that is a bit larger than the opening of the tube.
• Poke a small hole in the center of the aluminum foil.
• Tape the aluminum foil over the other opening of the tube.

How to use the viewer:

• With your back to the sun, hold the tube parallel to the path of the sun. Look through the viewing hole. Move the viewer until a small white circle appears on the paper.

See an example below: