Portfolio Management

SpiraPlan includes rich Project Portfolio Management (PPM) functionality that lets you analyze and collectively manage your projects and programs in a centralized place. SpiraPlan provides a platform for assessing the issue resolution and risk mitigation of your portfolios, as well giving you centralized visibility to help you plan and schedule you teams. SpiraPlan lets you identify the fastest, cheapest, and most suitable approach to deliver your projects and programs.

Overview Project Portfolio Dashboards Schedule Tracking Risk Management Portfolio Planning & Management Strategic Outcomes Portfolio Milestones Better Alignment Between Strategy and Execution Project Portfolio Management

Overview

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics.

PPM provides program and project managers in large, program/project-driven organizations with the capabilities needed to manage the time, resources, skills, and budgets necessary to accomplish all interrelated tasks. It provides a framework for issue resolution and risk mitigation, as well as the centralized visibility to assist with planning and scheduling.

Project Portfolio Dashboards

Projects in SpiraPlan are organized into programs and those programs are then organized into portfolios.

This lets you see a system-wide view of all the portfolios in SpiraPlan, and manage their schedule and progress.

In addition, SpiraPlan lets you see the top open risks across all the current project portfolios and take mitigative or corrective action as is necessary.

SpiraPlan also has a dedicated dashboard for each of the project portfolios in the system that lets you see the requirements completion, schedule, progress and top open risks in each of the programs that comprise the portfolio.

Schedule Tracking

The SpiraPlan project portfolio views include an integrated schedule widget. This lets you see the macro schedule for each portfolio, all its programs, products, projects, and releases in one easy to understand GANTT chart view.

Each bar in the chart graphically shows the % complete of the program, project, or release, and how it visually relates to the other parts of the schedule.

Risk Management

This is a key part of PPM, and SpiraPlan includes an integrated enterprise risk management capability. The risk management module lets you identity, analyze, treat, and monitor project and program risks with support for risks, mitigations, tasks and risk cubes.

Risks are a unique artifact within SpiraPlan (separate from issues or defects) that have their own types (business, technical, schedule, etc.), attributes and workflows.

Portfolio Planning & Management

SpiraPlan includes powerful portfolio-level planning and backlog management capabilities, that extend the program planning and management capabilities to the portfolio level. This gives enterprise teams a clearer way to connect strategic business outcomes with program execution.

For organizations managing multiple programs, products, or strategic initiatives, portfolio planning is essential for ensuring that delivery work remains aligned with business priorities. SpiraPlan lets users define, organize, and track high-level portfolio objectives, maintaining traceability down to the program, capability, milestone, and delivery levels.

Strategic Outcomes

Strategic Outcomes allow portfolio stakeholders to define the major business goals, transformation objectives, mission outcomes, or enterprise priorities that the organization is trying to achieve. These outcomes sit above the program level and provide a structured way to express what the portfolio is intended to deliver.

Each Strategic Outcome can be linked to one or more Program Capabilities, enabling organizations to connect portfolio strategy directly to the program-level work required to realize it. This makes it easier to see which capabilities support which strategic goals, where investment is being directed, and whether planned work is aligned with the outcomes that matter most.

Portfolio Milestones

Portfolio Milestones help organizations define major planning checkpoints, target dates, executive reviews, funding gates, release horizons, or other important portfolio-level events. These milestones provide a high-level planning structure for coordinating work across multiple programs.

Each Portfolio Milestone can be linked to one or more Program Milestones, allowing teams to connect enterprise-level planning dates with the detailed program schedules that support them. This gives leaders a better view of how program execution contributes to broader portfolio commitments.

Better Alignment Between Strategy and Execution

One of the biggest challenges in enterprise software delivery is maintaining alignment between strategic planning and day-to-day execution. Portfolio goals are often managed in presentations, spreadsheets, or disconnected planning tools, while delivery teams manage their work in separate systems.

By managing Strategic Outcomes, Portfolio Milestones, Program Capabilities, and Program Milestones within the same platform, organizations gain a clearer line of sight between executive priorities and delivery progress. Teams can better understand why work is being prioritized, leaders can see how program plans support strategic outcomes, and stakeholders can make better decisions based on connected, traceable information.

Project Portfolio Management

Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software is a business solution for managing projects at scale. Project portfolio software makes it easier for you to understand the resources, timelines, and overall business goals at a higher-level scope. It helps coordinate current projects while simultaneously planning for future projects.

With its support for project-level custom properties, SpiraPlan enables you the means to assign timelines, goals, priorities, budgets, and other attributes to your projects so that you can manage them as a part of a program or portfolio.

For the list-based custom properties (both single-select and multi-select), you can map the custom property to a centralized list of system-wide custom lists. This lets you reuse the same list of values for multiple custom properties, as well as allowing you to use the same list for programs, portfolios, and users.

The project portfolio view lets you see all of the products/projects together with their key configuration settings and any defined custom properties. In the example below, we're displaying the list of products, including the budget, next milestone review date, technologies used, database platform, and business importance rating. You can, of course, sort and/or filter by any of the displayed fields.

You can also show/hide different fields to customize your view. For example, during a planning/budgeting phase, you may want to show priority, budget, and milestones, whereas, in a meeting concerning technologies and asset management, you may want to organize the products by platform and database to understand which products your team(s) are using.