We get a lot of questions about portfolio analysis and we offer some great webinars on this topic. In this blog we thought it would be helpful to give you a general overview of Portfolio Analysis and how you can get started using it. A portfolio is just a collection of projects or project ideas that you define. For example, next quarter’s IT projects, or next year’s new products. A portfolio analysis is an interactive way of choosing the projects that offer you the best business value that can be accomplished with the people and the budget that you have available.
You might have a lot of project ideas that you want to sort through to determine what’s going to give you the best business value. Or you might have a well-defined list of projects to do, but not enough budget to do all of them. In either case, creating a portfolio analysis in Project Web App can help you determine which projects will give you the best business value for the budget and resources that you have available. PWA uses business drivers to help you select your projects. A business driver is a goal your company wants to accomplish.
What is Portfolio Analysis?
Once your business drivers have been defined and prioritized, you can create a portfolio analysis.
Creating a portfolio analysis is the process of selecting a group of project ideas and, using the business drivers that you have defined, determining which are the best projects to do given your budget.
In Project Web App, you can create multiple analyses for a given set of projects and compare them to each other to help determine the best value for the budget that you have available.
How Do I start Using Portfolio Analysis?
Here’s what you need to do to get started with portfolio analysis in Project Web App:
Define your business drivers. You can define as many as you need, but too many can become unmanageable. You don’t have to use all of them for every analysis, so you can define specialized business drivers if you need to.
Prioritize your business drivers. Basically, this means deciding which business drivers are more important than others. You can create multiple prioritizations, so different portfolio managers can each have their own, or you can create different prioritizations for different types of projects.
Rate the impact for each driver for your projects. You can do this when the project is created by including the Strategic Impact project detail page in your workflow, or you can do this as part of creating a portfolio analysis (it’s in the wizard).
Choose the projects that you want to prioritize, and create a portfolio analysis.
For all your portfolio Analysis and Project Management needs, please contact us today.
