Advice on how to organize a large scale project across business areas. Portfolio vs Program, subcategory option in portfolios? | Community
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KellyBu1
June 29, 2021
Question

Advice on how to organize a large scale project across business areas. Portfolio vs Program, subcategory option in portfolios?

  • June 29, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 590 views

I am looking for the best way to organize a large scale initiative across business areas, but grouped by quarter. A little background, we are a large company- but only 2 business areas utilize WF. Currently the other business area and us(which we are the media department) use portfolios to keep our projects separate. As the media department, we receive requests from several different business areas for projects(photography/videography/live events, etc). We are about to undertake a large project where all our business areas will be requesting we take photos for them, but its all under one initiative umbrella if you will. I need a way to organize it for visibility and keep it separate from our normal workflow projects. Trying to understand the difference between program vs portfolio. I know a program cannot exist without a portfolio. I am leaning towards creating another portfolio naming it with this initiative and then putting all the project requests under it- my question maybe is more of how can I organize these projects within the portfolio? I need them organized by Quarter. Thanks for any input!

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1 reply

Lyndsy-Denk
Community Advisor
Lyndsy-DenkCommunity Advisor
Community Advisor
July 6, 2021

Kelly, yes, I would create a new portfolio and use as many programs as you need within the portfolio. Perhaps you use a program for each business area. The good news is that you can move projects around later if you decide on a different organization.

It might help to visualize a filing cabinet to remember the difference between a portfolio and program. The cabinet has all kinds of projects within them. Those projects can be grouped in two ways: a drawer and a file folder. The drawer is the portfolio (because it's the larger way of grouping projects) and the hanging file folder is a program (smaller). The file folder can't work without the drawer because of the specific hanging function; otherwise it just flops around on a desk, right?

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