This role is a showcase role that gives you an overview of the functions offered by both Project Management and Portfolio Management. It contains all the initial views available in Project Management and Portfolio Management. We recommend that you create your own roles according to your needs.
Project Management
The project manager in Project Management is responsible for creating, planning, monitoring, and completing projects. For more information about the individual tasks, see the workset descriptions in this documentation. The project manager's tasks include the following:
Creating projects
Maintaining object links
Scheduling projects
Creating project versions
Costing projects
Creating evaluations
Beginning approvals
Archiving projects
Creating status reports for projects
Creating documents in Project Management
All these tasks can be carried out with the showcase worksets Project Management and Portfolio and Project Administration, which are assigned to this role.
Portfolio Management
From the portfolio management point of view it is the responsibility of the Portfolio and Project Management role holder to maintain alignment with strategic objectives. This superordinate role is usually held by an executive in research and development or IT.
The portfolio manager and a systems administrator use second-level roles to control business user’s access to specific second-level navigation areas that match the users’ responsibilities. An IT systems administrator with SAP Enterprise Portal Content Administration rights can be responsible for the administration of the second-level navigation and can create the second-level roles. Different second-level roles can be defined for different users or sets of users.
In general, the systems administrator will create a new role; add the desired second-level pages (workset) to the new role (Pages/worksets: Portfolio Management, or My Portfolio Objects, or Resource Management, or Analytics); assign user(s) to the new role; and repeat to create as many individualized roles as needed.
The portfolio manager can also appoint an administrator role for SAP Portfolio and Project Management 5.0. This person will perform all the tasks utilizing the Administration workset. This role can also be created by the systems administrator.
A project portfolio contains all the projects and programs for a given enterprise. A project portfolio, or a sub-portfolio, can also comprise the projects and programs within one department. Portfolio management views processes across multiple projects, rather than within individual projects, and is based on an iterative process of prioritization, decision-making, and monitoring. Therefore, portfolio management contains applications that enable you to obtain an overview of the entire project portfolio.
The portfolio management solution is integrated with operational and planning systems. Through monitoring and reporting, you can view how projects are progressing, assess how the project portfolio aligns with strategic corporate objectives, and decide how best to realign resources to accommodate new projects.
You can use two different kinds of monitoring and reporting:
Decision-based reporting: You can identify decision points within the process model and capture the decision support information. Decision-based reporting is especially geared to regulatory reporting. Refer to the Application Help for an explanation of the process chain details and decision points.
KPI-based standard reporting: The reporting framework delivers the latest aggregated data at regular intervals enabling you to monitor key performance indicators to assess the overall health of the portfolio on an ongoing basis.
For more information about the individual tasks, see the workset and individual iView descriptions.
The Portfolio and Project Management role is provided with several basic techniques for working with portfolios and projects:
Flexible portfolio hierarchies: The overall structure of a portfolio is reflected in a hierarchy of buckets. This allows you flexibility in categorizing the portfolios.
Portfolio life-cycling: This is a complete decision process for bringing portfolio items from one gate to the next. You can make all gate-decisions in the context of a portfolio.
Portfolio reviews: These are executed as part of a company’s business planning process which may take place annually, bi-annually, quarterly, monthly or on a unplanned basis. As a portfolio manager, preparation and execution of portfolio reviews is supported by reporting, scoring, and simulation for a given set of portfolio items.
Scoring: You use quantitative and qualitative criteria, based on questionnaires, to derive numerical scores for risk, and other types of soft data. You can implement different scoring models for aggregating data.
Strategic human resource leveling: You define strategic, long term resource demand in the portfolio itself or you can determine it by bottom up aggregation from the underlying operational system. You can compare structured resource-demand against the consolidated portfolio resource availability. You can manage the new project pipeline by identifying potential capacity bottlenecks. This allows you to take the right measures to fix constraints.
Strategic financial resource distribution: In alignment with the portfolio hierarchy, you can aggregate the requested budget from portfolio items, and enable decision makers to efficiently distribute the available budget. You can support strategic budgeting by gathering information from the bottom up and advising budget from the top down in a cyclic manner.
Portfolio dashboard and analytics: These enable you to analyze value and risks in your portfolio. You can monitor the progress of portfolio items through an easily-personalized portfolio dashboard.
The portal role Portfolio and Project Management (included in the Business Package for Portfolio and Project Management 5.0) is required if you want to use SAP Portfolio and Project Management 5.0 in the SAP Enterprise Portal. The Business Package for Portfolio and Project Management 5.0 has the Business Package ERP Common Parts 1.5.1 as a mandatory prerequisite.