Understanding Project Portfolio Management

This chapter provides an overview of Project Portfolio Management and discusses:

• Main components.

• Important data tables.

• Application Engine processes.

• Process flow.

• Integration.

See Also

PeopleSoft Scorecard 9.1 PeopleBook

Project Portfolio Management

Project Portfolio Management enables you to make portfolio management theories a reality in your enterprise. You can collaborate with business leaders to prioritize initiatives based on internal goals and predefined metrics, such as cost, risk, and return on investment (ROI). The application helps you plan, compare, and contrast project requests so you are able to make the right project investments to ensure that your organization undertakes the particular mix of projects that will lead to optimal results.

Main Components

This section discusses the main components of Project Portfolio Management, which are:

• Scorecards.

• Strategy components.

• Key performance indicators (KPIs).

• Project requests.

• Portfolios.

• Business units.

Scorecards

A scorecard is the visual representation of the degree to which you are meeting the objectives that your organization is striving to achieve. A scorecard is based on a strategy tree that comprises hierarchical nodes of strategy components.

Strategy Components

Strategy components are the elements that compose an organization's strategy. They represent the goals or key business objectives that an organization is striving to achieve, and are the objects that compose a strategy tree. Vision, strategic thrusts, and critical success factors are types of strategy components; they are the levels of a strategy tree.

Key Performance Indicators

A key performance indicator (KPI) defines the data value or calculation from the EPM Warehouse tables that is evaluated to determine how well an organization is meeting its critical success factors.

Project Portfolio Management delivers a set of preconfigured KPIs that provide executives and middle management the tools to analyze proposed projects and compare them with business objectives. These KPIs have been developed in conjunction with leading consultants, and provide measurements of:

• Risk.

• Key business objectives (KBOs).

• Return on investment (ROI).

• Net present value (NPV).

• Estimated costs.

• Estimated benefits.

• Variance percent.

• Project run rate.

• Health.

• Estimate to complete (ETC).

• Forecast.

• Forecast variance.

• Forecast variance percent.

• Earned value

• Forecast time variance.

The delivered KPIs that you use for Project Portfolio Management are loaded by a data mover script that is run when you install the application. The KPI IDs of the delivered KPIs all begin with PM_. These KPIs use an object type of PROJECT_REQUEST and use data from projects and project requests. The KPIs are associated with several delivered portfolios that enable you to evaluate project requests. You can use them with scorecards or portfolios that you create, to evaluate important project metrics.

See Also

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Project Requests

Project Portfolio Management includes a project request component that enables your enterprise to create project requests and project request templates, perform detailed costing at department and account levels, rate how well a project request supports your organization's key business objectives (KBOs), and rate its relative risk. The Project Request component (BC_PROJ_REQUEST) also enables you to view project dependencies and milestones for each project.

See Also

Establishing Project Requests

Portfolios

A portfolio is a collection of objects that are grouped together for comparative analysis. In the case of Project Portfolio Management, the objects that are compared are project requests, and this information is used to make decisions about which projects to undertake and maintain.

Additionally, portfolios are used to define the score group categories on the Project Request - Scoring page to generate scores that indicate how well a project supports an organization's key business objectives (KBO) and quantifies a project's relative risk.

See Also

Establishing and Analyzing Project Portfolios

Business Units

Enterprise Performance Management applications use performance business units (PF business units). If you plan to integrate Project Portfolio Management with PeopleSoft Program Management, you must create one PF business unit that corresponds to each project business unit.

To enter costing information for project requests, you also need to define general ledger business units (GL business units).

See Also

Setting Up the Operational Warehouse - Enriched for EPM Analytical Applications

Important Data Tables

This table lists the main records (tables) that Project Portfolio Management uses, with a description of the data they contain:

Application Engine Processes

The main Application Engine processes that Project Portfolio Management uses are:

• The Scorecard Assessment Application Engine process (BC_ASSESS).

  This process calculates and assesses key performance indicators and strategy components. The delivered jobstream is BC_ANALYZE.

• The Update Milestone Probabilities Application Engine process (PPK_UPD_MST)

  This process updates risk milestones.

See Also

Using Project Portfolio Management Processes and Utilities

Process Flow

The main tasks that you perform while using Project Portfolio Management are:

1. Setting up the Enterprise Performance Management foundation.

2. Establishing system-wide options and user preferences.

3. Creating project requests and submitting them for approval.

4. Running the Scorecard Assessment process to calculate and assess KPIs.

5. Creating project portfolios.

6. Reviewing and analyzing project portfolios.

The following diagram shows these tasks:

Project Portfolio Management task overview

Most of the tasks that are listed involve multiple steps and require you to complete multiple pages in the application. These details are discussed in the subsequent chapters of this PeopleBook.

Integration

PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management enables you to integrate and use budget to date, budget total, actuals to date, and actuals total data from your projects transaction system with Project Portfolio Management by using the extract, transform, and load (ETL) procedure. Typically, you will process ETL on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your organization's requirements. Use the Modular Deployment report within the Metadata Console feature to determine which ETL maps to run.

Additionally, you can set up integration options that enable the system to share project request data with PeopleSoft Program Management.

See Also

Defining Integration Settings

Setting Up the Operational Warehouse - Enriched for EPM Analytical Applications

Bringing Source Data Into EPM Using Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL)