The current Portfolio Optimizer appears to be designed for organizations that plan all of their projects up front and then rank all of them against each other before starting work on any of them.
It would be great to have a tool that allows us to manage Portfolios while they're in flight. For example:
On the Portfolio Optimizer, there is a bar for Budget and a bar showing how much has been planned against it.
- This is really cool but the spend bar only takes Planned costs into account - not actuals.
- The Portfolio Manager would have the same Budget bar but the Spend bar would be based first off of Budget (for projects that don't have plans yet), then plan (for projects that don't have actuals yet), then EAC (for projects that have costs but aren't done), and then Actuals (for projects that are Completed).
- Also, it would be great if the Spend bar was two colors to show the difference between actuals and remaining planned/estimated costs.
The Portfolio Manager would also allow for projects to be hidden without removing them from the calculations for budget, actuals, etc. This comes in very handy when trying to rank new projects while there are many completed projects in the portfolio. Currently, the Portfolio Optimizer removes hidden projects from the calculations so that completed projects create a lot of clutter. There should still be an option for hiding+removing, but there needs to be an option for hiding only.
