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Portfolio overview and related analyses

Let us look at a business scenario to understand how you can use the PPA iCubes to analyze portfolios, related projects, and labor resources assigned to these projects.

Cathy is a Portfolio Manager whose responsibility is to manage projects right from inception to completion. She must have an overall view of all the portfolios and related projects related to ensure that the portfolios are aligned to the organization’s strategic goals. A project manager is responsible for an individual project, whereas a Portfolio Manager is responsible for managing multiple projects, works with project managers to plan the budgets and resources, collaborates with project managers to negotiate and mitigate risks, and facilitate for successful completion of projects.

Cathy wants a dashboard that would enable her to have a bird’s eye view of all her projects, analyze variances, ensure that projects are within planned costs and schedule. She also wants to have a glimpse at how resources are spread across projects and understand their allocations.

Creating the dashboard

The Portfolio Overview dashboard contains Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and reports that help Cathy analyze various parameters. The dashboard utilizes data from the Portfolio, Project, and Project Resource Task iCubes to provide an overall view of portfolios and enables you to drill-down into cellular levels. To create the dashboard, you have to log in to Numerify360 for IT and perform the following tasks in the Portfolio iCube of the PPA solution.

1. Creating KPIs to understand costs
2. Creating reports to analyze portfolios and their variances
3. Creating reports to analyze project distribution based on variances
4. Creating reports to view related resources and analyze their efforts

Here is an example of the Portfolio Overview dashboard:

Analyzing the dashboard

Using the Portfolio Overview dashboard, Cathy can derive the following insights:

• The KPIs indicate if the actual project costs are within the planned project cost or if they have exceeded. The Benefits Target helps Cathy understand what the organization stands to gain through these projects.
• The List of Portfolios report provides a snapshot of all the portfolios that Cathy is managing and helps her understand variances with respect to cost, schedule, and effort. The variance is indicated through colors where Green indicates that it is on track, Amber indicates possible risk, and Red indicates abnormal variance requiring immediate attention.
• The Project Distribution by Cost and Schedule Variance report allows Cathy to drill down from the Portfolio report to analyze variances in projects that are associated with a specific portfolio. The bubble chart distributes projects in the form of bubbles based on schedule variance on the X-axis and cost variance on the Y-axis.
• The # of Resources by Project report enables Cathy to drill down from the Project Distribution report to view the list of sub-projects and number of resources assigned to each project. She can further drill down from this report to understand if resources are utilized efficiently. Cathy can then identify underutilized resources, collaborate with Project Managers or Resource Managers, and take measures to improve resource utilization.