Welcome to Project Portfolio Management

Project Portfolio Management is a powerful, integrated portfolio management solution from Serena Software that helps people in your organization—project managers, portfolio managers, resource managers, team members, executives, and other project stakeholders—make better decisions, which helps to ensure maximum returns on the items your organization chooses to make. Using Project Portfolio Management, an organization can manage applications, projects, product initiatives, resources, and assets—also called a portfolio—in a manner consistent with the principles of best-in-class business practices. All of this can be accomplished in a single system that integrates, manages, and analyzes enterprise data.

Project Portfolio Management provides key benefits for the following user types:

Executive Stakeholders Executive stakeholders require visibility across a portfolio. Project Portfolio Management helps your organization get that visibility by helping you build a set of value-based initiatives and then make key item decisions with greater confidence. A role-based home page provides personalized status information when users log on, which helps give everyone quick insight into the items on which your organization is currently working.
Portfolio Managers Along with project managers, portfolio managers help manage IT projects and other items so they are on-time and on-budget. Portfolio managers can start with high-level portfolio views, drill-down into detailed project data, and use "what-if" analysis tools to help assess the impact of changes within the portfolio and to ensure continued alignment of a portfolio with the overall business objectives.
Project Managers Along with portfolio managers, project managers help manage IT projects and other items so they are on-time and on-budget. In order to help drive consistent team collaboration, project managers build task plans, find and schedule the appropriate resources, resolve issues, mitigate risks, and track progress. Automated reporting and built-in notifications help ensure that project managers spend less time managing documents and data and more time managing projects. Project Portfolio Management also supports bidirectional integration with Microsoft Project.
Resource Managers Effective resource management leads to fewer bottlenecks, better forecasting of demand, and more measurable performance. With Project Portfolio Management, resource managers have the ability to assess competing demands for resources and then efficiently direct the right people to the most critical tasks and activities. Agreements with project managers about resource allocation (both generic and specific resource types) are clearly tracked.
Team Members Team members are freed from the randomizing effects of shifting priorities and demands. Project collaboration, document management, and time tracking tools help individuals make better decisions in support of the portfolios to which they have been assigned. Project Portfolio Management provides a familiar browser-based user interface that is intuitive and easy to use.

Users who belong to these user roles will have access to the project portfolio tree, the Projects module, the Analyzer module, the Resources module, and the Workspace module. Not all users will have access to all of the features within these areas at all times—how users get access to the various features of Project Portfolio Management and the projects your organization adds to the project portfolio tree depends on how your organization chooses to configure Project Portfolio Management and the licenses available to the users in your organization.

Another key role for Project Portfolio Management is the Administrator. Users in your organization who belong to the Administrator role are the users in your organization that are responsible for configuring Project Portfolio Management. Depending on your organization—its size, project methodologies, and so on—an administrator role can range from the traditional IT administrator to a project management office to a small group of skilled, hands-on project managers. The administrator role in Project Portfolio Management is a security group that enables access to the Administration and Configuration modules in which decisions can be made that affect your organization's global project portfolio.

Project Portfolio Management provides granular administrative tools through the use of the Project Portfolio Management Administrative and Configuration modules. An administrator is responsible for installing, setting up, and maintaining Project Portfolio Management. It is important that you understand how Project Portfolio Management works and how users interact with data. This information helps you understand how to customize Project Portfolio Management so that it properly captures the type of data that is meaningful to your organization and so that the Project Portfolio Management system is maintained while new users, project portfolios, and item types are added.

For more information, see the following topics: