This chapter describes how to create a portfolio and the basic portfolio information.
This chapter covers the following topics:
A portfolio is a set of projects that have common financial objectives, strategic objectives, and funding source. In Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis, you can create what-if scenarios for your portfolios in planning cycles. The scenarios facilitate effective analysis, funding, and management of your projects.
A portfolio can include new projects and on-going projects. You can use one of the following approaches to create portfolios for your company:
Create overall company portfolios that reside as peers to each other without any sharing structure, such as one overall IT portfolio and an R&D portfolio for the entire company.
Create internal department portfolios that reside in a shared organization hierarchy, such as multiple internal IT portfolios for each department in the company.
You initially select projects into a portfolio by defining two attributes, the Portfolio Selection Class Category and Portfolio Organization Hierarchy.
The portfolio selection class category is a class category that you use to select which projects belong to which portfolios. All the portfolios automatically contain the portfolio selection class category that was defined by your implementation team. When you create a portfolio, you enter a unique class code for the portfolio. All portfolio projects must contain the portfolio selection class category that is defined for your company.
Vision Services has a class category named Business Objective. You can designate the class category as the portfolio selection class category. Only one portfolio in Vision Services can have the portfolio selection class category value as Business Objective.
The system administrator or a member of the implementation team can define class codes (for this category) such as Capital Spending, IT Governance, and Marketing Investments. You can assign one of the class codes to a portfolio in Vision Services. Any person or role who creates a project is responsible for entering that class category and class code on projects that they want to include in the portfolio. The projects with a class code for the portfolio selection class category that matches the class code for a portfolio are eligible to be in the portfolio.
You use an organization hierarchy to control which projects can belong to individual portfolios. Only projects that are within a portfolio's start organization or below it in the organization hierarchy can be a part of that portfolio.
If your implementation team defined a Portfolio Organization Hierarchy in Oracle Project Foundation, you can specify a start organization within a portfolio to indicate which branch of the organization hierarchy Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis will recognize as the top of your hierarchy. Projects with a start organization that matches the portfolio's start organization or reside below it in the organization hierarchy can be included in the portfolio. If you want to use the entire organization hierarchy to select eligible projects, enter the top organization as the portfolio start organization.
If you do not specify a start organization, the portfolio will select all the projects within the operating unit.
Vision Services contains two project-owning organizations: Services - East and Services - West. Because the start organization is Vision Services, all the projects residing in Services - East and Services - West are eligible to be included in the portfolio.
You can secure portfolio access by granting one of the following predefined roles to users:
Portfolio Analyst
Portfolio Approver
Portfolio Owner
A user can have different roles for different portfolios. For example, you can be a portfolio approver for one portfolio, and a portfolio analyst for a different portfolio. A user may also have different roles for the same portfolio. For example, you can play a dual role of a portfolio analyst and a portfolio owner for a single portfolio.
The portfolio analysts can create portfolios, planning cycles and scenarios, and typically perform the what-if analysis on portfolios.
A portfolio analyst can perform the following actions:
Create portfolios
Create and initiate planning cycles
Collect projects and create scenarios
Compare scenarios
Recommend scenarios
Submit the portfolio plan
Close the portfolio plan
The portfolio approver reviews the planning cycle and either approves or rejects the portfolio plan. The portfolio approver is typically a senior manager in your organization who is responsible for making the funding decisions.
A portfolio approver can perform the following actions:
View the portfolio
View planning cycles
Compare scenarios
Approve or reject a portfolio plan
A portfolio creator is the portfolio owner. The portfolio owner has all of the functions available to the portfolio analyst and is the default portfolio approver. There can only be one portfolio owner for a portfolio.
Related Topics
Implementing Oracle Project Foundation, Oracle Projects Implementation Guide
Implementing Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis, Oracle Projects Implementation Guide
The first step in the portfolio planning flow is to create a project portfolio. A project can belong to only one portfolio and one planning cycle at a time. However, a project can belong to multiple scenarios within the planning cycle. There is only one active planning cycle for a portfolio.
When you create a portfolio, you define a basic set of information that helps determine the projects that can be included in the portfolio. You also grant access to specific users by assigning them to the roles of portfolio analyst, portfolio approver, and portfolio owner.
To create a portfolio:
Open the Create Portfolio page.
Enter the portfolio name, a class code for the unique portfolio selection class category, and the name of the portfolio owner. You can optionally enter a start organization from the portfolio organization hierarchy and a description for the portfolio.
Define portfolio access by entering the names of additional users that you want to have access to the portfolio, including the portfolio approver and portfolio analyst. You can assign more than one person to these roles.
Apply your changes.
On the Create Portfolio page, you can access the approved and closed portfolio plans from the previous planning cycles under the planning cycle history.
You can delete a portfolio only if you have not created a planning cycle for it.
To delete a portfolio:
Open the portfolio to be deleted. Check to see if there are any planning cycles in the portfolio because if there is a planning cycle, you cannot delete the portfolio.
Delete the portfolio.