When you’re starting to think about managing projects as groups, then you might be ready for project portfolios. Of course, you’ll always manage individual projects, but do you also want to manage groups of them?
Define Project Portfolio: A collection of projects managed as a single entity.
For example: in Standard Time® you can view revenue charts for an entire project portfolio. For the sake of this chart, you don’t care how much revenue a single project brings in. You care about an entire collection of projects. How much does the entire collection bring in?
Another example might be finding the effective billing rate for an entire project portfolio. In other words, how much are we making per hour on this entire portfolio of projects? We care about individual projects, of course. But we’re interested in comparing one portfolio against another. Which portfolio has the highest effective billing rate?
Watch the fanciful little video below, and then try this for yourself. It will take some time. You will need multiple projects to be able to call it a portfolio. One project doesn’t make a portfolio. So you’ll need to assign tasks to resources and track some time for multiple projects before you can really start seeing value. This is a high-level management technique.