Portfolios in PPM: Best Practice for describing them

[smooradian]

Hi there, looking for guidance on best practices for what to use as the description for Portfolios.

Do you describe strategic corporate themes or do you describe corporate business units?

[kellykaufmann]

Hi Sara

Descriptions are available (e.g. Differences between Projects, Programs and Portfolio ) but honestly what makes sense for identifying the collection of work will depend on your organization, specifically your organization's structure and funding and goals.

[reg2view]

Consider aligning portfolios with the customer, and the customer decision maker (e.g., for an IT internal customer, the portfolio/customer could be 'Finance' and the decision maker 'CFO'). Decision maker is not to be confused with the Portfolio Manager role.   In the Finance example, the decision maker could be the CFO, while the Portfolio Manager is the individual in IT responsible for oversight of all programs (Helsinki) and projects in the Finance portfolio, and may provide oversight to multiple customer portfolios.   The role also has an active advisory relationship with the decision maker. They work together to provide portfolio oversight.   This approach can work particularly well for distributed IT budgets, and when deploying a customer "Account Manager" model, but any organization can adopt it.  

For demand management purposes, this also facilitates the use of both organization goal alignment, and customer (portfolio) objective impact evaluation.   Each portfolio has a financial (and possibly resource) budget, and may have unique portfolio criteria for demand evaluation.   The approach is also particularly useful with PPS + ITFM (Service Strategy), but by no means required.   Good luck!

[Mathias Vandend]

Hi,

Good question — I've seen this come up a lot in PPM implementations, and honestly there's no single right answer. It really depends on how your org is structured and how funding works.

Business Unit-based portfolios work best when you have clear budget owners per department. Think "Finance", "HR", "Operations" — each with their own portfolio manager and budget target. Simple to report on, easy accountability. Your BRMs will thank you.

Strategic theme-based portfolios ("Digital Transformation", "Customer Experience") are great for executive alignment, but they get messy fast. Projects span multiple themes, budget ownership gets blurry, and you end up in endless debates about where something belongs.

What I'd recommend for most orgs: structure portfolios around business units (that's where the money lives), and use Strategic Planning to map work to strategic themes at a higher level. Best of both worlds — financial accountability AND strategic visibility.

Whatever you go with, keep the portfolio description dead simple. It should answer three things: what work belongs here, who's the decision-maker, and what's the budget. Something like: "IT projects supporting Finance. Decision-maker: CFO. Annual target: $2.5M."

One thing to keep in mind — each portfolio carries a budget target in ServiceNow, and demand evaluation criteria can differ per portfolio. So the boundary you choose needs to make sense financially, not just organizationally.

Some useful reads:

• SPM Best Practices and Implementation Insights
• Quick Start Guide for Strategic and Portfolio Planning

Happy to go deeper if you share a bit more about your org structure.

[ITSMgal]

One thing to consider regarding Portfolios moving in Helsinki and beyond is that Portfolios contain a budget target amount. When using the Financial Management budgeting processes, you are asked to give a target for your portfolio and then to select projects and demands that meet that target for capital and operational expenses. Additionally, the budget for the portfolio is approved as a whole. While thats not necessarily a description, it may help guide decisions for how Portfolios are structured.