Welcome to the Portfolios Leadership Reporting. It is mainly focused on the portfolio manager and program manager roles as well as the project manager role as it pulls all the projects, portfolios, and programs in the organization together and highlights what is most important.
Important: If you are not familiar with Power BI, we recommend you review the Power BI Fundamentals lesson. It will provide you with a working knowledge of the Insights report.
Here is a summary on the purpose of each page, experience the various filtering options, and understanding of how to make this report work best for you.
- There are six (6) separate pages in this report. Each page can be accessed directly by selecting the tab at the bottom of the screen and contains a variety of ways to slice, dice and focus the data.
- Also, each page has an info icon in the header, so any time you need real-time help, click on it to open a pop-up info pane containing a basic description of the report page you are on.
- Intake Funnel page provides a visual of all ideas, proposals, and projects in the pipeline and what stage they are currently in. Within these there are seven stages. Ideas go through identify and review. Proposals continue through initiation and selection. And Projects progress through planning, execution, and closing. These stages are configured by your organization and may vary from this example. The size of the funnel areas indicate volume in each. This visual helps to easily identify where potential bottlenecks exist which could indicate a process issue, resource constraint, or other issues needing review and resolution.
- Portfolio Overview page focuses on the financial health of the portfolio. This page lists all active portfolios with consolidated financials from all associated projects. Based on the color coding in the variance column you can easily see the financial health of each portfolio and focus on those that already have a negative variance as these are sorted to the top, or those that may be approaching a budget overrun. You also have a graph of cumulative costs comparing forecast actuals and the budget by month. Recognizing portfolios may cover many years, you can select the year or years you want to focus on. From this page you can drill through to a portfolio status report or a project milestones report.
• Portfolio status report provides details for a specific portfolio including high level portfolio information, associated program details, and associated project details. These details can be seen in the four views – overview, details, tracking, and financials. This report pulls all portfolio information together giving you, the portfolio/program manager an efficient way to review the health of the portfolio and an easy way to drill into those items needing immediate attention. The financials are captured at the project level and are included here whether they are associated with a program within this portfolio or directly to the portfolio itself. The dynamic features of this report provide simplified analysis of all financials over specific periods of time for specific projects with a comparison of budget versus forecast versus actual. Over time, this information can assist with maturing the organization’s project budgeting and forecasting.
• Project milestones report pulls together all the milestones from all the projects in the portfolio, whether they are associated to a program or directly to the portfolio itself. Here you can see the milestones that have been completed separately from those that are still active and with the sort set on KPI, you can focus on those milestones in need of immediate attention.
- Portfolio Timelines page groups all the projects by their respective portfolios including those that are associated to a program within each portfolio. You also have color coding by sponsor and based on the timeline selection you can see where there is considerable overlap or potential opportunities to have other work accomplished. This page easily identifies potential resource constraints.
- Program Overview page is identical to the Portfolio overview with the focus on Programs. You can also drill through to a program status report and a project milestone report. These program reports help to refine your focus on a specific program. This can be very helpful if the program is part of a large portfolio or if a specific program is in the critical path of the overall portfolio and is falling behind.
• Program status report provides all the details around a specific program including tracking information for all projects associated with this program.
• Project milestones report focuses on the project milestones specific to this program.
- Program timelines page is also the same as the Portfolio timeline, just with a focus on programs.
- The last page is the Portfolio Cost Breakdown page. There are three views: budget, estimated at completion, and actual. This report shows the financial impact by portfolio breaking it down to the item level. Viewing the same set of data across all three views provides insight on how each item is performing financially.
As you can see, the Portfolios Leadership Insights report pulls all the data together for easy analysis, helping you the Portfolio/Program manager to increase portfolio/program success in your organization.
Disclaimer: Some images in the instructional video and text instructions contained herein may appear different from (or not available) in your organization’s Sensei IQ instance due to specific custom configurations and/or continuous solution updates. Ensure that you are already an enabled user in the Sensei.IQ for Project application and check out the What’s New page. Contact your system administrator for any assistance.