Monitor initiatives and manage resources
Modified on Mon, 15 Jul at 7:29 AM
Project managers and leaders need easy access to reporting, status updates, and the team's resource management plan to ensure work is on track and to make informed planning decisions. They can rely on real-time portfolios with dashboard and workload insights to source all this information in one place.
How to use portfolios
Portfolios are the best way to organize, monitor, and report on multiple projects in one place. They can help you answer questions like:
- Which projects are at risk or on track and why?
- When are projects kicking off or completing?
- How is work balanced across teammates and/or projects?
- What are the top priorities for my team?
- Where do I need to focus my attention most?
Like projects, portfolios offer several different views (listed below), so you can get different insights about the projects in the portfolio.
- Projects—Main view for at-a-glance updates across projects that you can sort and organize.
- Timeline—Drag and drop projects to create then view annual/quarterly/monthly plans and schedules.
- Progress—Post status updates to summarize all efforts towards your initiative.
- Workload—Monitor team bandwidth and make adjustments by dragging and dropping—all based on work already assigned to them across your portfolio projects.
Examples of how to use portfolios
Portfolios are ideal for project managers and team leads, but anyone can use them in a variety of ways. Here are some examples to get you started:
Role | Example |
Product managers | Track product launches or gauge product manager bandwidth or engineer coverage for each launch |
Executives/leaders | Monitor top projects towards achieving team or company OKRs and export PNGs of progress to use in presentations |
Managers and agile scrum masters | Track sprint work in one portfolio and use workload to balance allocations and set agile work points |
Event planners | Manage multiple events and see them on a timeline, while using dashboard to check in on high-priority milestones |
Creative directors or producers | Get a pulse across major projects and use dashboard to report on progress to cross-functional partners, or make a case for more resourcing |
Campaign managers | Track active campaigns and manage team bandwidth across all campaign pieces with Workload |
Customer success managers | Keep active client accounts in one place, and gauge their health across status updates |
IT managers | See all active software deployments or considerations and see implementation schedules on timeline |
Want a template for any of the projects above? Check out our templates gallery to get up and running in a few clicks.
Tips for managing projects and resources with portfolios and workload
- Project status update looking stale? Click the Request Update button, and the owner will be assigned a task to update the project’s status.
- Teammate looking overloaded? You can drag and drop tasks to reassign or reschedule them, or comment on a task to check in with the assignee first. Set up task effort across any projects in your Portfolio so you can more accurately gauge hours or effort spent on each task.
- Home in on the details you need to see by sorting. Sort your portfolio by custom fields to ensure priorities are on track or group similar projects. Workload is automatically sorted by assignee.
- Share the portfolio link or add members to your portfolio so others can see progress.
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