configuring portfolios, programs and projects

We started by giving our Events team their own portfolio, and all their events are programs, and the pieces they need are projects. For example: Portfolio = 2016 Events Portfolio Programs = March Madness event; Superbowl event; Board Meeting, etc Projects = Table tents for March Madness, Name badges for Superbowl party, etc Does that make sense?

Hi Skye, Thanks- it does make sense- but here's where I get confused. Say my department- creative services- are responsible for a number of those deliverables. How is that configured in the instance between our two departments. For example- the portfolios for my group are broken down by business unite: HAA, UDO, FAS so if we're working on a deliverable for the events team- where do our projects sit? in our portfolios, or the Events Team portfolio..... I don't know- I may be over complicating things! tks Karen

It's a valid question. You are not overcomplicating things - as a sysadmin it's your job to overthink things so you can simplify it down for your users. The answer boils down to "remember, this is your Workfront and so it comes down to your preference". We tell our users that Workfront doesn't make you have a process, or fix your process, so make sure you come up with something consistent. For us, based on our preferences, the projects we did for the events team are located in the events team's portfolio under the program for that event. However, we have a custom form on every project. Since our events team does events for our business units, they indicate on each project which business unit they did the project for. In this way, any project can be reported as being an events project (based on portfolio and program), where the event was for the HAA business unit (based on custom form). The same thing goes for all business units. We do the work on all their projects, and even though we did the work, it lives in their portfolios. The work we do for ourselves would be considered "corporate" and there's a portfolio for that too. I hope that makes sense. If you would like to see my instance of Workfront to help you picture it better, I can certainly set up a webex. Just contact me offline.

Hi: I’m not sure this will be of value, but let’s see… We align our portfolio-program-project structure to the hierarchy by which we approve and fund projects, not by how we are organized. We have a SVP/Executive in a line of business who has money to pay for projects. We create a portfolio to support that SVP/Line of business. That SVP sponsors, funds, and prioritizes the projects in the portfolio. We have the portfolio divided into stand-alone projects and programs. If we have two executives in a single line of business, and each has its own money to spend on projects, we would create a separate portfolio for each executive. It’s the command and control that guides us, not the organizational structure. We use a Program when we have a big effort that will take a number of projects to accomplish. We get one bucket of money for the effort and then model multiple projects under the program. Anyone from any group can work on a project in a given portfolio. How do we handle projects that are funded by multiple lines of business, or have global impact? We’ve done it two ways. We’ve created the equivalent of an enterprise-wide portfolio and put projects in there as needed. The other way is to designate an executive as the primary/lead sponsor and stick the work in her/his portfolio. Back in the dark ages, when I worked in Marketing (translating the concepts to WorkFront), we would have created a Portfolio by Customer, maybe by customer division if the customer was big enough. Then, projects for that customer would be modeled in programs and standalone projects as needed. Again, we didn’t create portfolios by our organizational structure, we created them by who was making the decisions and paying the bills. Hope this helps. Eric

Skye, Very informative! you nailed it- I would LOVE it if you could give me a tour of your instance. I'm in the middle of configuration and while we're only starting w my office for starters (creative services) other departments will come on quickly- so I'm trying to think enterprise wide w/our configuration. please feel free to contact me offline: karen_rutz@harvard.edu 617-495-8183 Thanks for your willingness to share! Karen

Portfolio and program configuration is a big question for us. We've had portfolios for each department we serve (we're an in-house Marketing department), but this doesn't make the most sense and we really don't utilize them for any planning for a few reasons: The Marketing department is the one with all the people doing the work, so for resource management it seems that a single portfolio would make more sense for understanding priorities and capacity. We have only one resource pool for this reason. The budgets, while controlled by the individual departments, don't really have any bearing on our Workfront projects. We do not charge back the costs of our human resources, just printing, ad placement or other 3rd-party vendor costs. It seems redundant for reporting purposes as we have the departments as Companies in Workfront as well From a program standpoint, I can see making programs to reflect the key areas of focus for our organization as a whole (ie, recruitment, alumni engagement, etc.). But these could be under a single portfolio. Does anyone use a single portfolio? Beth Massura Assistant Director of Operations, Marketing The University of Chicago Booth School of Business 5807 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60637 Phone: 773.702.7598

This remains a vexing problem for our IS services. Questions to Eric: 1. Do you use Workfront Capacity Planner? 2. If so, how have you structured your resource pools to support your approach to line of business portfolios? 3. If so, and you want to capacity plan for projects in a mulitiple-line-of-business portfolio, how have you structured those resource pools?

Hi: I’m an Eric. I’ll answer the questions below… 1) Do we use the WorkFront Capacity Planner? --> Not in regular weekly use. We struggle to get the project plan quality high enough to use the Capacity Planner meaningfully. We’ve used it in the past, wondered about the results, and drilled down and found the project quality wasn’t good enough - mostly with regard to overdue tasks. We are on the verge of trusting what it tells us, however. I’m optimistic; 2) Resource Pools - We have one resource pool that has everyone in it. We tried multiple resource pools once long ago, but since people from one pool can work on projects with people in the other pool, the distinction between people in one pool and people in the other pool was essentially meaningless, we went to one pool. I would create multiple pools if the people in one pool will never work on projects with people from another pool. I hear that WorkFront is going to allow multiple resource pools on a project someday. That will make it more sensible to divide people into multiple pools. 3) Multiple Lines of Business - We do have multiple lines of business, and a portfolio aligned to each. We do not look at capacity by portfolio, however. We look at capacity enterprise-wide. If the cap planner says we need 50 artists in August of this year, then we drill down to see why - and we find data quality issues in projects in addition to knowing what demand is driving that staffing level. If you have multiple lines of business, and the project teams never cross over lines of business - in other words, LOB A is always serviced by Team A - then you could create a resource pool for Team A. That would actually simplify the capacity planning process by reducing the demand and reducing the number of roles you have to look at. You’ll have to set up the capacity planner and select projects anew each time you switch from looking at Resource Pool A to Resource Pool B. There are no Capacity Planning Profiles in WorkFront. That would make it easy to switch from one pool to another. Oh well, we’ll look to the future for that. We get a lot of value from the User Utilization functionality, however. We back into Capacity planning using it - if our existing staffing level is overloaded, and you’ll see that in red on the user utilization screen, one way to resolve that long term overallocation is to staff up. The data quality issue still matters, but you can see the overdue work readily (in pink) and can start fixing the specific problems that impact the specific resources you’re looking at. We have a few roles that are pivotal in what we do - we aren’t concerned about the capacity of every role. Business Analyst, Solution Designer, and Developer are the core roles that worry us. I can look at what all the BAs, SDs, and Developers are doing in User Utilization and see if we have problems on the near horizon. I’m not sure I got at what you’re looking for…keep the questions coming. Thanks, Eric

Good afternoon, Do any of you utilize the Portfolio/Program feature in order to track Finances for a Portfolio/Project? We have a group of projects which we invoice under a program and are looking for a way to have the financial info tracked collectively into the program. For example, we have a budget for the Program and want each project's budget to be deducted from the program total, so that any point and time, we are able to see what's left for the Program budget. Any ideas or insight would be greatly appreciated. Mike Haleas

We don't really use it at that level, but wouldn't it be as simple as using a View in the Program view to display Actual, Planned, and Budget? You could even Group and summarize the totals. You could write some Text Mode code to subtract the difference, etc. You could also write a Project Report to accomplish the same thing (filter on the Program ID) and display and summarize whatever works best for you. In my mind that might be easier because then you can Filter and Group on things more easily. Do either of those work for what you need?