Program hierarchy?

[Earl L]

We're looking into the possibility of doing a program hierarchy within the PPM suite. The requirement, as currently stated is: "we want programs within programs under a single portfolio."

There is a field available in the pm_program table called "top_program", which is as you might expect a self-reference to the pm_program table.

Under this scenario we would want to make the top_program field available for some limited subset of users (probably portfolio managers) to create these nested programs. So the top_program field would have to be exposed for at least one view.

In addition we'd want to add a related list of programs, for those top_programs to be able to list/display the programs contained within it.

All of this is pretty straight forward, with one possible exception. For some reason, the top_program column is read only in a clean OOB instance (checked in new Madrid developer instance). 

So the question is this: Does anyone know of a good reason why the top_program would be read only in an OOB instance? And then the follow-on to that is, does anyone have any idea of the long term implications of changing that field from read only to writable?

My suspicion is that some of the portfolio/program roll-up reporting will not take into account that there's a program parent/child relationship. I'll be testing this to the extent I can.

Any thoughts? Anyone out there given this a try? We'd really like to make this a reality but don't want to regret making the changes to implement it. Would appreciate any help or discussion on the topic. Thank you. 

[Earl L]

Anyone else have any ideas about this?

[Cynthia Flowers]

Hi Earl,

Did you ever get any more info on this? What did you do? We are trying to do something similar.

[Earl L]

Nothing concrete or helpful, unfortunately. As with many things looks like this is going to be left to our own devices to test/verify how it works.

[Cynthia Flowers]

Okay, thanks for getting back to me and letting me know.