Can projects belong to multiple portfolios?

[dkvasak]

I was reading the documentation about this today which says:

Portfolio

The primary portfolio to which this project belongs. A project can belong to multiple portfolios.

but I read some where else that projects can only belong to ONE portfolio. Which statement is accurate?

Thanks!

[Sean Witt · Accepted solution]

Hi Denise.

The short answer is that the first definition is accurate, "A project can belong to multiple portfolios".

But I personally would recommend sticking to one portfolio per project; I think it keeps things cleaner in terms of reporting and rollups to the portfolio.

A lot of the Out of Box (OOB) functionality leans toward this single portfolio relationship...the Portfolio field on the Project's Details form section is a single value select reference field. And the Portfolio form includes a related list for all of the projects in the portfolio. Switching or removing the portfolio value on the project will pull it off of this related list. So the OOB form is steering you to a single portfolio per project.

But there is also an OOB many to many relationship created between portfolio and project. You can use that many to many to tie the single project to multiple portfolios...but if you go down that path, you may want to consider removing the OOB Portfolio field from the project form (because it only displays a single portfolio value, which would no longer be accurate).

And you would also want to test/experiment with how hours and costs rollup...I assume the single project would rollup to all of the portfolios you associate it with, but I don't know that for sure. That is the piece that concerns me; I think you keeps things cleaner and simpler by maintaining just a one-to-one relationship between project and portfolio.

If you need to add layers to your portfolios for reporting purposes, you can use programs. A single portfolio can contain multiple "child" programs, and projects can be tied to a project and/or a program. So that may also been an option to look into...

Sean

[meera10]

Sean, under what scenarios would you associate a project with multiple portfolios? Can you give me an example? Thanks!

[dkvasak]

Thanks Sean - when originally asked I said there should be a one to one relationship between the two, but we do have a few enterprise level projects that span multiple portfolios. I will present the information and let them decide.

[Sean Witt]

Hi Meera.

I personally prefer limiting a project to a single portfolio, but Denise's question was whether a project can belong to multiple portfolios, which it can. I'm not sure if Denise or others have particular use cases where they would want to associate a single project to more than one portfolio? But the one example I have heard in the past is for large scale enterprise projects that impact multiple portfolios. In cases like this, I personally would still rather handle this in one or two other ways, versus tying the project to multiple portfolios. A couple of possibilities might be:

1. Have a dedicated portfolio to contain broad projects like this, versus associating the project to all or multiple portfolios.

2. Add a field on the project form to flag these "enterprise" projects, so that you can easily identify and report on them, while still leaving them tied to just a single portfolio.

3. Use the Out of Box Tags functionality to classify the projects.

I'm sure there are other approaches...probably just depends on the situation that is driving the desire to associate a project to more than one portfolio.