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Planview Customer Success Center

About Portfolios

Portfolios are designed to meet the needs of the executive team by giving senior managers the ability to create portfolios of projects and to track the performance of those projects against portfolio benchmarks such as budgeted cost and resource hours as well as delivery dates.

Portfolios are designed with flexibility in mind, allowing you to model just about any hierarchy by simply adding relevant projects to portfolios, and then selecting parent-child relationships between portfolios to manage the roll-ups of budgets and actual data. Roll-ups to portfolios are based on the percentage that you set for each project. For example, a new project may be assigned 33% to each of 3 different business unit portfolios. This gives managers the ability to see exactly how their portfolios are performing at any time. Easy drill down from a portfolio directly into the member projects and member portfolios gives managers instant visibility to items that may need attention or that are performing particularly well.

Portfolios support user defined fields, so each category of portfolio can track different sets of key metrics. You can also define new tabs based on portfolio classes, giving you the ability to highlight important portfolios at the top level of PPM Pro menus.

Portfolios provide the engine for Application Portfolio Management, in which an application portfolio type describes application attributes and allows you to link and roll-up budgets and actuals from timesheets and projects associated with applications. Because it includes both cost and resource information from initial budget through actual costs, this helps you get a full picture of your entire portfolio, not just strategic projects.

Portfolios and Permissions

Portfolios use profile-based permissions to configure access. See About Profile-Based Permissions for more information.

Classes and Categories

Portfolios are named and configured by a user in your organization with administrative privileges. That user creates a Class, which identifies the top-level organizing structure and creates and names the navigation icon in the user interface. For example, you might have a class in PPM Pro called "Portfolios," or it might be called something else. This documentation will refer to the yourPortfolios tab.

For information about the Portfolio user interface, see Working with the Portfolios List page.