Portfolio Overview

The Portfolio Overview allows you to quickly analyze and compare the key metrics of all the projects in the same workspace.

For a practical guide to running portfolio Kanban across multiple projects in one board, see our portfolio Kanban overview.

The metrics are calculated automatically from your project data and you can assign a corresponding color to each project, thus marking its overall status.

Fields

In the Portfolio overview, you will be able to see 6 predefined fields.

1. Start – marking the start of each project.
2. Finish – marking the end of each project.
3. Budget – calculating the total project budget assigned to items.
4. SPI – Schedule Performance Index. 1 meaning on schedule, below 1 behind schedule, and above 1 ahead of schedule.
5. EV – the total value of items that have been completed.
6. Progress – The percentage of completed vs all items in the project.

Configuring SPI and EV

SPI and EV are not fixed formulas — you can choose the weighting value the calculation uses. The options are budget, duration or estimation.

Which one is right depends on how your projects are measured. Cost-driven work is usually best weighted by budget; effort-driven delivery by estimation; and schedule-driven programmes by duration. Pick the one that matches how you already judge progress, so the index agrees with your own reading of the project.

Colors

As mentioned, all of the metrics are calculated automatically based on your project data. However, the automatic indicators only show some parts of the picture.

Thus, you can use an additional color field to mark the overall status of each project. We suggest using red for projects that are in trouble and green for those performing better than expected.

You can learn more about the fields used in this view, by reading about Earned Value Management.