Understand the Portfolio Optimizer

Transcript

After completing the business case for a project with the status of idea, we click the submit button. This changes the status to requested and changes these options to approve or reject. You can make the approval here, but you can also compare this project with other projects in this portfolio. Before deciding whether to approve it or not, the place we want to go to do this is the portfolio optimization tool for this portfolio. We can click on the portfolio name here to get to the portfolio. This project is in. From here we click on Portfolio Optimization.

Here we see the project we want to compare. We can filter this list to include all projects with a certain status by clicking on the preferences icon.

In this case, We’ve chosen only to see requested and approved projects. Let’s add current to this list.

Now you can see some projects with an alert in the score column. It says the project will be scored only if the business case is complete. The project is submitted and or approved. Business case sections for undefined are still missing.

You can see that there are many fields with missing data. This makes it impossible to make a fair comparison between these projects. The best practice is to require all projects you want to compare in portfolio optimization to have a completed and a submitted business case.

We’ll go back and filter only on projects that have a status of requested and approved.

These projects have all been submitted with a complete business case. That means the submit button within the business case was clicked. As we did earlier. now we can see values in all the columns. Workfront has calculated a score for each of these projects based on these values and the priority you want to have for them.

You can see and adjust these priorities by clicking on the optimize icon here. What if this portfolio values high ROI over high alignment? Notice how the scores change when I optimize in this way.

After the projects have been scored. You can sort your projects by their score by clicking in the scoring column. Header. You can also just drag and drop them if you want.

If there are projects you don’t want to compare, you can unselect them. When you do this, you can see that their data is excluded from the totals in this bar. You can hide unselected projects altogether by clicking on this Hide Unselected button.

To show them, just click on it again.

Once the projects are in the priority you want, you can finalize the priority in Workfront.

click the set priority button, and the system will number the projects from one on up and record that number in the portfolio priority field. In each project. You can see this field in views and reports and also in the resource Planner. You can also approved these projects right here if you want.

Be sure to click the save button. To display the portfolio priority field in the Resource Planner. Click the settings icon. And turn on the Display Portfolio Priorities option. And click save. Click the order button at the top of the column to align the resource planning priorities with the portfolio priorities. Be sure to save when you’re done.