Portfolios and Programs

Hi Amanda, We have our Portfolio/Program structure set up to mirror the the reporting structure of our organization. So our Portfolios match our VPs (Office of the Chief Operating Officer, Provost's Office, President's Office, etc), then the Programs are all the units that report up to them (Under Chief Operating Officer the Programs are Enterprise Operations, IT, Communications, Analytics). This helps us with security. We share the Portfolio/Program structure appropriately with each team working in WF. This helps ensure that no one is able to access projects they shouldn't be able to see. Only Enterprise Operations is able to see Enterprise Operations projects, only IT is able to see IT projects, etc. Hope that's helpful. Mohini Sinha, CSM Project Coordinator Excelsior College

I agree with Mohini. Portfolios and programs function by allowing you to group projects together so you can share them all in the same way, or work on them all in the same way, and this usually falls somewhat along org structure, like business units. "https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/217182017-Understanding-Portfolios" title="https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/217182017-Understanding-Portfolios">https://support.workfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/217182017-Understanding-Portfolios this attached weblink says it best: "A Portfolio is a collection of projects that have unifying characteristics. Those projects usually compete for the same resources, budget, or time slot." When you organize your projects in portfolios and programs, and you run project or task reports, you can group them by portfolio and program--so it gives you two additional levels to organize with. I compare portfolios to filing cabinets, and programs file drawers, and projects as folders with tasks as paper. You can have your folders all over your office, or you can put them in a drawer and then in a filing cabinet. Putting them in a portfolio will show that a project has a clear alignment to a set of resources (be they people, subject, year, or other) which lends them an amount of legitimacy (in a business sense). Leaving off the portfolio field is like looking at a pile of folders under someone else's desk. What are those for, you wonder? What's in them? You purchased Workfront as a work management system for a group of users in a company. For the most part, portfolios work best if a group of users agree to use the same ones for the same purpose (if everyone had their own stash of drawers, we wouldn't be able to function as consistently as if we could if everyone did everything the same way in the same place). There are very few scenarios where every PM has their own portfolio, unless every business unit only has one PM. If a business unit has 5 PMs to manage the unit's projects, then 5 PMs share the portfolio and may have control over their own programs (or they may collaborate on a set of programs equally). How you label your cabinets is entirely up to you, but for my own sanity I often label them by year (e.g. 2018 Marketing, 2019 Marketing, 2020 Marketing) solely so that I can switch portfolios off at the end of the year and control reports so I don't get too many results (e.g. run a report for any project in any 2018 portfolio) Ditto on the drawers. How you label your programs depends on your bodies of work, but these are usually the big moving pieces in a unit. A marketing division might have a marketing portfolio and every program might be a different campaign. Or they might have different portfolios for every aspect of the business, and each program might have campaigns related to those business sectors. Or Marketing might choose to have programs like "Email", "Social", and "Print" (this setup is only effective if projects are set up in this way, and there aren't any relationships between a group of projects--otherwise it is more likely that a campaign might have a group of emails, social posts and print projects, and the preference would be to put this group of projects in a program to show they are related) Finally when you organize by portfolio and program there is a certain amount of related material you can place at the portfolio and program level. It's an option to put a creative brief custom form on a program so that you don't have to repeat that information for every project. Ditto budget spreadsheets or other related files--instead of placing them at the project level, if these apply for every project in a program, then put them at the program level. So look to portfolios and programs as a way to stop repeating certain pieces of information in every project. -skye

Hey Amanda, Here's one from a Support perspective... I have customers that use them as products that they sell/market, organizations that they work with, and yet others that treat them as parent 'projects'. The basic concept that we use in support is that everything works like a filing cabinet. A portfolio is the cabinet itself. A program is a folder in the filing cabinet. A project would be a binder, with tasks being the sheets in the binder. You can have a project in the cabinet without being in a folder, or you can have a project in a folder in the cabinet, but you can't have a project in multiple folders or multiple cabinets. This had made it far easier for some of my customers to visualize how Workfront's object hierarchy works, and has allowed them to tailor their needs around how Workfront is configured. I hope this info helps! Thanks, Dustin Martin Assigned Support Engineer Workfront

Hi Dustin, Do you keep your project queues in your portfolios? Thanks! Miranda Rais GVC

Hi Miranda, My instance looks like a cluster bomb blew up. I'm in Support, so nothing in my instance is legitimately used for anything other than me testing things out, or saving configurations to help customers out. That said, a couple of my customers that I support set up a portfolio effectively named something like "Workfront Admin Work" or "Non-work Projects" or things like that. They typically throw request queues or test projects in, and when they go to report on their normal data, they add a filter for "Portfolio Name - Not Equals - [name of portfolio]". Best of luck! Dustin Martin Assigned Support Engineer Workfront

I'll go one further than Dustin: we started out with one "non reportable" portfolio but then other groups wanted their own. Eventually I put in a custom form on the portfolio with a "non-reportable" field, and corrected all my reports to report only on the portfolios that were "reportable" -- it would have saved me some time to have done this from the beginning but... hindsight's always 20/20. -skye

We use Portfolios extensively (and Programs frequently). We use Portfolio to capture the Brand we are working on, and then can easily share and report on projects by Brand. So if a project is in a portfolio, and that PM is suddenly OOTO, another PM who has access rights to that Portfolio can easily cover off. We also run many reports, dashboards at the Portfolio level. Programs are a bit more adhoc - sometimes its the Product for us under the brand, but others use it to categorize the type of work (Digital vs Print). Katherine Haven, PMP VP, Director, Business Technologies - PMO FCB

That's great - ty :) Miranda Rais GVC

Hi Skye, What do you mean a custom form with a 'non-reportable' field, is that specific to each non-reportable portfolio? (just to be sure, as I'm quite new to this) Do you mean it's actually called something like that on the custom form, so that is the field you use as a filter on your report? You don't do this on the reportable right, as in this case you would just report on the portfolio name itself? I did wonder what would be the user case for adding a custom form onto a portfolio and who would fill that out? Thanks! Miranda Rais GVC

ty Katherine - we will also use the portfolios for reporting, hence wanting to move the queues out... Miranda Rais GVC