Present Project Dependencies within a portfolio

[Farzaneh]

What is the best way to visualize project dependencies within a portfolio? Additionally, what data should be captured within projects—such as tasks, relationships, interdependencies, or any other relevant information—to ensure these dependencies can be properly visualized?

[Sven-atClient]

Hi @Farzaneh 

Not really sure how to answer this: What are project dependencies? How would tasks and other information relate to the visualization of those dependencies? 

[Farzaneh]

By project dependencies, I’m referring to situations where one project cannot start or progress beyond a certain milestone until another project completes a specific task or milestone.

If I understand correctly, inter-dependencies between projects can be created through issues or tasks. Is that correct? If so, how can we visualize these dependencies between projects within a portfolio? For example, would it be possible to display them in a Gantt chart view or another format? My executives are particularly interested in understanding the relationships between projects within a program or portfolio to make informed decisions about prioritization.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @Farzaneh,

Since the inter-dependencies between projects you're describing effectively "push" each other, I'd recommend using Workfront's native Cross-Project Predecessor features. That said, they are a bit tricky to set up, manage, and report on (i.e. just a small cell tag on the native Gantt reports).

To help your executives understand the relationships between projects within a program or portfolio, I invite you to consider three related solutions we offer that might meet those requirements:

• Our Roadmap solution lets you tag existing Tasks with data driven bar colors, fonts, and icons to efficiently generate real time professional Roadmap reports at various levels of detail
• Our Timeline solution lets you choose one or more Critical Tasks, set their Path Colors, then view Timeline to trace the resulting multiple Critical Paths through all predecessors and feeder projects
• Our Swimlane ADVANCED solution lets you draw the Big Picture Your Way by creating Swimlane reports with customizable Panels, Timeframes, Swimlanes, Icons, Labels and Colors.

We recently added our new Smart Connectors feature to the latter to literally connect the dots with lines (see below), which we'll be adding in due course to the other two solutions, too. If you'd like to chat further about any of them, I'd be happy to connect via doug.denhoed@atappstore.com.

Regards,

Doug

[Farzaneh]

Thank you for your response, Doug. I’m having some difficulty understanding how the solutions help with displaying dependencies, perhaps a demo might clarify things!

I also visited your website and have a few questions about custom reporting options. Specifically, I’m interested in executive portfolio/project reports, custom project status reports that can be regularly distributed to only the project team members (automatic pull of the people to send the scheduled report to, without having to update the distribution list manually), and visually engaging and understandable reports that present strategic information to both staff and executives and advice for the necessary configuration for that. 

When I reviewed the executive and project report apps on your site, it appeared they were more oriented toward presenting specific system data fields rather than customized fields—although I may have misunderstood the descriptions. Additionally, with the cost of some apps and licensing fees on top of our current annual Workfront expenses, it seems that the costs could quickly accumulate if we were to adopt multiple APIs or add-ons from the AtAppStore.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

My pleasure @Farzaneh,

Yes, having created well over 50 solutions in our catalog over the last several years, we have lots to choose from, so I think you're right: a demo might indeed clarify some things. At your convenience, I invite you to email me at doug.denhoed@atappstore.com so we can then set something up.

Regards,

Doug