SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

Following on from a very popular series of blog posts on “Getting Started with Project Online” I have decided to extend that with another Getting Started series of posts for two areas I didn’t cover in the original getting started series found here: http://bit.ly/1IFInbc

The first mini getting started series will cover the Portfolio Strategy / analysis functionality then we will do the same for Project Workflow.

The Portfolio Strategy feature enables you to align projects with defined business drivers and objectives, the tool can then prioritise the projects based on how they fit with the business driver prioritisation. Further analysis can be done based on cost / resource constraints to work out the projects to run for the best strategic value. A detailed white paper for Project Server 2010 can be found here: Portfolio strategy with Project Server 2010 (white paper). The feature is the same in Project Online. This post will give a quick getting started intro to this feature.

For the purpose of this post I have a vanilla PWA instance with very little data. I have created a new Project Level custom field called “Budgeted Cost” and a new Resource level look up table field called “Primary Skill” – these will be used later. I have also created three very simple projects with values for “Budgeted Cost” and assigned resources to the tasks – these resources also have Primary Skills tagged against them. The projects contain some over allocations to show the resource analysis part. The projects I have are:

Here are the resources:

Now I can get get on with configuring the Portfolio Analysis part. Firstly I will create 5 business drivers. First I need to enable the Strategy links on the quick launch menu, click Edit Links on the left hand quick launch menu:

Check the check box for Strategy and the three links below the Strategy heading:

Click Save & Close from the ribbon menu. Now you should see these links appear on the quick launch menu:

Now we can see the Strategy links we can set up the drivers. To do this click on the Driver Library link and you will see the following:

Click the New button on the ribbon menu and complete the form for the first driver:

Complete each of the fields as required – only the Name is a mandatory field. Once you have created your drivers the Driver Library screen will look like this:

As you can see I have created the following drivers:

• Increase Market Share
• Increase Sales
• Decrease Internal Costs
• Improve Staff Morale

Now the drivers need to be prioritised, click the Drive Prioritization link on the quick launch menu and you will see the page below:

Click the New button on the ribbon and complete the form:

Click the button on the bottom right corner of the page to “Prioritize Drivers” and you will see the page to rate the drivers against each other:

In the example above I clicked the arrow in the “Select a Rating” box and choose how “Decrease Internal Costs” rates against the other drivers like below:

Once the first driver is completed it will look like this:

Click the Next Driver button in the bottom right corner to set the ratings for the next driver. Repeat this process until you get to the final driver then click the Review Priorities button in the bottom right corner. You will then see the driver priority as below:

What is key here is that the rating has been consistent, expand the Consistency Ratio option:

This should be at least 80%, the higher the better. You can create multiple driver prioritisations for different scenarios etc.

The next part is the analysis but before we look at that we will jump back to the Project Center and edit each project to set the impact of each project against the drivers, this is done on the Strategic Impact PDP as seen below for one of the example projects:

This was done for the 3 example projects I have created.

Now that is set up the next part is to create an analysis but that will be covered in Part 2 that will follow.