Nested portfolios

[Community Alums]

Requirement:- Customer requested to arrange portfolios in parent-child relationship, so it would be easy to navigate portfolios, while populating it in demand/project record. Similar to what you already see for "category" field on knowledge article. This also means they have good amount of portfolios to configure (which is against what I have experienced in past of having limited portfolio count).

My analysis:-  Though technically it is possible to arrange portfolios in nested way (like category in knowledge article), but it has very high impact, following:-

1. Customization needs to be duplicated to other areas of ITBM application for all “Portfolio” field, like “Portfolio” field on Project, demand and other form.
2. OOB Portfolio console consolidated all associated demand, project, program and also list risk, programs, financials etc from associated demands/projects. To having nested portfolio, we need to have several discussions on how to arrange consolidated information from child portfolios
3. Demand roadmaps has limited lanes to represents Demands from each portfolios
4. PMO Dashboard, Portfolio planning console, alignment workspace etc are several OOB dashboards, which is not designed for nested portfolios, and won’t be even possible to customize it.

Therefore, it is not feasible to customize it. We should only have parent portfolios configured, and child should be considered as programs, but for customers, all portfolios are genuine portfolios and not programs.

Question:- What are your thoughts on it? Have you seen such a ask from customer to configure 20-30 portfolios, in parent child relation ship? Is it achievable?

Thanks
Anandsagar

[Dhiren Aghera]

Hi Anandsagar,

As per my knowledge parent child relation cannot exists between two portfolios within PPM. The PPM hierarchy in ServiceNow is Portfolio >> Program >> Projects.

A program or a project can be associated to only one Portfolio.

A project can be associated to only one program.

A portfolio can have multiple program and projects with in it.

In your use case you should think of dividing into large Portfolios and then program within it.

[Rajesh_Singh]

Any of the following 3 options can help 

========

May be portfolio planning workbench can help :

or you can use alignment planner workspace

or one UI Action on "Portfolio" table named as "Portfolio Gantt Chart" which we can mark as active and able to see all the projects in the portfolio in gantt chart view. Please see below

[Rajesh_Singh]

Below steps can help you to achieve at portfolio level. You need admin access to do this.

1. Activate Portfolio Gantt Chart and mark active as true as shown below

2. Then go to portfolio record and locate : Portfolio Gantt chart , as shown below

Then you will get beautiful view as below

let me know if this helps

[John Wagemaker1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Anandsagar,

I do not think that having parent-child portfolio's in ServiceNow are desirable. As already stated the OOTB functionality is not designed for doing so. 

My personal experience when confronted with large numbers of portfolio's is that often strategies, goals and programs are mistaken for portfolio's. Maybe that is something to look into...

grtz John