This section applies to anyone who wants a deep understanding of the portfolio, program, intake and/or innovation management using the app with a specific focus on managers who are responsible for Portfolios and/or Programs, as well as individuals who manage the organizational project intake funnel using Business Challenges, Ideas, and Proposals in Portfolio IQ.

Important: If you are not familiar with Portfolio IQ, we recommend you review the Overview of Portfolio IQ page. It will provide you with a working knowledge of the Portfolio IQ area.

Portfolio IQ has a dual focus:

1. First, it manages the project intake funnel for your organization.  Business Challenges can be captured to record specific problems or challenges.  As appropriate, Ideas are solicited to identify potential solutions, which could become Proposals and eventually projects if approved. This component of Portfolio IQ is very flexible and can be implemented in its entirety or as components. For example, you may implement only Ideas and Proposals, or even just Proposals, depending on organizational requirements.
   
   
2. Next, Portfolio IQ allows for the definition of Portfolios and Programs to define, manage, and track larger initiatives which are typically delivered through several associated projects.

A portfolio and/or program manager role in Sensei IQ is mainly responsible for:

• Creating and maintaining business challenges
  
  A business challenge is focused on defining a problem or challenge that the business needs resolved. At this point the focus is not on the solution, rather on ensuring the challenge is well understood and that additional investment of time and money is warranted to resolve it.
  

• Creating and maintaining ideas
  
  Ideas provides a central repository for innovations and other potential solutions to business challenges. Capturing and recording ideas supports a strong organizational memory and ensures that good ideas are not forgotten, while also providing the discipline to review and approve which ideas are appropriate to proceed to the next stage in the intake funnel, the proposal.
  

• Creating and managing proposals
  
  Portfolio IQ allows you to capture the high-level details for each Proposal. This will include a brief description of the proposal, anticipated dates, key details from the business case, and a timeline of the notes or actions taken during the proposal creation; in other words just enough information to allow for an informed decision on whether a proposal should be approved for additional investment in time and resources as a project.
  

• Creating and maintaining portfolios and programs
  
  While Projects are where all delivery work is done in Sensei IQ, you can combine projects into either Portfolios or Programs to define and manage the larger initiatives in your organization.  This enables big picture management of larger initiatives while still defining and controlling the details at the project level.
  

• Collaborating on support items
  
  Portfolio IQ supports collaboration to ensure your team can track and manage key items for a portfolio or program.  This includes issues, risks, decisions, change requests, assumptions, constraints, lessons learned, and documents.  Any team member can create, update, and even close a support item to support successful portfolio or program delivery. 
  

• Understanding portfolio and program status
  
  In order to understand the status of Portfolios and Programs you must understand the status of the associated projects.  Therefore, a core component of understanding portfolio and program status is reviewing the Insights and Status reports which rollup not just the schedule details but also the status of all the supporting items such as issues, risks, and changes to give you an accurate big picture of the status of the initiative.
  

• Portfolio and program administration
  
  There are many other things that only your IQ administrator will be able to do such as deleting portfolio and program records but you need to be aware of how to disconnect and reconnect support items to another portfolio and/or program record.
  
  
  

Depending on your organization’s strategy execution and benefits management process, the portfolio and/or program manager role in Sensei IQ may also be responsible for:

• Managing the relationships between strategy and execution
  
  Strategy IQ provides an efficient way to set organization strategy by defining benefits and associate them with strategic goals as well as portfolios, programs and projects. Benefits can be tracked against specific metrics to measure and validate the realization of the benefit across all levels in Sensei IQ – projects, programs, and portfolios. Within Strategy IQ, you can easily link back to project, portfolios and programs.
  
  
  

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_{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.}