Portfolio Analysis with Project Online
Portfolio analysis that allows you to determine whether you are delivering the right projects is an essential area of project portfolio management. Portfolio Analysis with Microsoft Project Online offers a portfolio analysis module as a core feature. This allows the cloud based product to support detailed assessments of your projects. Which ultimately allows you to execute multiple tasks and explore various aspects of your project portfolio.

The Resource Pool

Before we look at the higher-level portfolio analysis features, let’s start with the resource pool. The enterprise resource pool is where you will store and organize all the resources able to be assigned to project work.

You can assign a range of custom field values to the resources in the resource pool. Values could include department, skill, language and whether that resource is generic or not. By defining multiple pieces of metadata for a resource, you can then leverage them more dynamically and effectively throughout the project portfolio. Team member availability for project work is key in determining the optimal portfolio.

Project Prioritization

Project Online’s portfolio analysis module also allows you to prioritize your projects using one of two methods: business drivers or enterprise custom fields.

The business drivers within the portfolio analysis module relate to the central goals of your company. These can include anything from improving customer satisfaction to reducing operational costs. You can assess any project in your portfolio against these drivers, which in turn generates a prioritization ranking for a project.

The system, too, can calculate an ideal project mix based on these drivers. The user ultimately will decide on the portfolio based on risks and returns.

Defining Drivers

Defining the business drivers against which you will assess your projects is easy and follows modern portfolio theory. Go to the Driver Library and select ‘New’ on the Driver tab. You can then enter a name and description for the driver and assign it to a specific department, if applicable. You will also want to enter descriptions for each project impact statement before clicking on ‘Save & Close’ to save the driver.

Defining business drivers not only serves as an analytical tool within Project Online, but can also provide clarity and consensus across your enterprise. This helps to ensure that stakeholders in your organization share goals and priorities. When entering a description for a driver, make it detailed. You can also include a metric that defines how a project’s performance is assessed against the driver, such as a survey or report.

Alternatively, you can also use custom fields to execute prioritization analysis within your portfolio. This option is ideal when you are working with third-party support tools. In addition, when you have pre-existing prioritization processes already implemented at your business.

Defining Project Impact Statements
When defining project impact statements for a driver, be sure to define measurable results by which you can define success. As an example, assume you were to define a ‘strong’ impact on a risk mitigation driver. This in turn might state in your project impact statement that you will eliminate two internal risks found on your last audit.

If your driver is to increase customer satisfaction, you might define point increases in a customer survey for each impact. Such as a strong impact might involve an increase of 15 points. Selecting a specific impact statement for a given project forecasts the level of return expected from the project for that driver.

Running Scenario Analyses

Another useful feature in Project Online is that it lets you run specific scenarios across your portfolio that you can then use to prioritize projects. By defining certain external constraints, including available resources and funds, you can generate an optimal list of projects based on those criteria. These hypothetical scenarios do not affect the projects themselves unless you commit to a scenario. At that point, the system populates relevant fields and moves the project into an execution stage.

This tool is particularly effective when you are dealing with budgetary constraints. This allows you to create a list of projects that delivers the most value within the limits of your available funds. At the same time allowing the user to determine the level of risk.

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