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
