How to Execute a Successful Project Portfolio Management Program

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How to Execute a Successful Project Portfolio Management Program

How to Execute a Successful Project Portfolio Management Program

Achieve your organization's strategic goals with this project portfolio management template

How to track all of your program, projects and initiatives across teams and workstreams with a flexible portfolio management template.

John Scrugham

This is a portfolio management template for people to plan, track, and deliver quality, on-time team projects. This tool is perfect for a portfolio of projects spanning entire companies or simply one team ー whether internal or client-facing.

What is a portfolio management template?

Project portfolio management (PPM) is a project management strategy for deciding which project to prioritize and pursue. A portfolio management template helps you manage the PPM process so that you can achieve your PPM goals efficiently and effectively. One of the main reasons for using a portfolio management template is to give you visibility into your resources, risks, budgets, and more.

It is important to understand the role of portfolio management in an organization. In terms of PPM, a portfolio consists of multiple programs that you manage. A program consists of related projects and these projects all share a common strategic goal. You can learn more about project management from

PMI⁠

to understand why PMOs (project management offices) need portfolio management templates to mange the PPM process.

How to use this portfolio management template?

Step 1: Set up teams and phases

Whether your team adopts an agile methodology or not, your team consists of human resources and your projects have different project phases. In the

Set Up⁠

page, you will list out each of your team members and project phases which will be used in other parts of this template.

Step 2: Establish the mission and vision

Within the

Strategy Doc⁠

, you will write the mission and vision of the various programs and projects you manage. As you work towards your organization's strategic goals,

change management⁠

can become an issue if you don't communicate why changes are coming to the organization. This page acts a real-time document for anyone in your organization to reference.

Step 3: Oversee projects

As a portfolio manager, you have probably delegated decision-making to individual teams and project managers. In the

Projects⁠

page, you can list out each project, the responsible team, and other properties related to the project. Within this page, there are sub-pages like a dashboard template and project plans for each team to view and edit. Coda provides additional functionality for you as your projects and teams grow.

Step 4: Track weekly meeting notes

Many resource management templates are done in Microsoft Excel and Excel may not be the best tool for keeping track of weekly syncs and meetings. On the

Review Meeting⁠

page, you and your project managers have a meeting template which you can duplicate to keep track of meeting minutes and meeting notes.

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Who should use this portfolio management template?

You’re someone who oversees a portfolio of projects as a VP of Product, Program Manager, Project Manager, or Ops. Or, surprise, there’s no PM function at your company and you’ve been thrown into managing all the projects for the first time!

You want to launch on-time, high-quality, and under-budget projects. You need a way for the team to communicate progress ーor lack thereof ーon the various programs (sometimes called initiatives or workstreams) and course-correct during your weekly (daily, monthly.) sync meetings.

Problems with existing free templates

Your current tool is either an inadequate specialty app that you’re using to track the portfolio of projects, or it’s Google Sheets or Excel. (Even if you’re using an app, you’re probably sneaking off and tracking some part of it in a spreadsheet). While spreadsheets have given you a blank canvas to DIY a project management tool and start hacking tracking, the cracks of using it week over week ーespecially as you grow the team and number of projectsー are more than starting to show because it’s:

Disconnected: You email the Excel sheet. You share the Google Sheets. But, shoot, where are the meeting notes and the supporting docs? Thoughts, notes, and important edits are buried in emails or, worse, stuck in what we in the biz call the longest cell a spreadsheet has ever seen.

Fragile: Are people making up their own statuses when they track work? When did someone override the longest cell a spreadsheet has ever seen?

Unfocused: You’re creating multiple tabs for each workstream / stakeholder, which means you’re not connecting the pieces together. Or you’ve created an unwieldy master list that everyone is having to find their projects within. Can you hear the control/cmd+Fs of from your desperate teammate’s keyboard who’s trying to find and update their work? Are your maverick colleagues tracking in an entirely separate location (i.e., a stack of sticky notes) because they just don’t get it?

Ugly: You’ve sunk in so much work to make that spreadsheet feel like an official internal tool by using tricks like conditional formatting, data validation, and pinning the top row. You think it looks nice-ish and fairly usable. Your team politely smiles when asked to use it, but are secretly 🤦🏻‍♀️ when the Zoom video is off. It’s so close to feeling like your own app, but then you remember: it’s just a spreadsheet. A tool built for calculating P&Ls or financial modeling that you are trying to bend ... and your team is starting to snap.

All these issues lead to your team not updating their projects, not communicating around what needs to be done, and not delivering projects on-time, on-budget, or smoothly.

Solution

In Coda, product teams like Figma are shipping world-class features with Yuhki’s

Product Roadmap doc⁠

and digital agencies such as Four Kitchens stay on top of client work using their

Project Roundup doc⁠

. We’ve heard countless other stories of how companies and teams are created PM tools with Coda that moved their efforts from disconnected to collaborative, fragile to agile (& app-like), unfocused to personalized, and ugly to delightful.

We’ve learned from our clients’ best practices and crafted a complete project management tool for you to copy, personalize, and use. This tool incorporates the expertise of dozens of project managers ー from seasoned VPs to the newly-minted ー who have built their own Project Portfolios from scratch using Coda. Stand on the shoulders of PM giants: to start, simply press

Copy Doc

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Disconnected → Collaborative via A Central Hub

The decision between using a doc, sheet, or project app (or toggling between the three) is finally over. Bring

Strategy Doc⁠

s , tracking

Projects⁠

, and the weekly

Review Meeting⁠

notes together into the same surface.

Go beyond by integrating your entire project tech stack by bringing in Figma files, embedding Miro boards, and syncing your Jira issues. Use Coda to send out calendar invites through Google Calendar, DM teammates on Slack when statuses change, and email the group your meeting notes via a simple click of a Gmail button.

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Fragile → Agile (& App-like)

Be more confident that your team (aka your doc users) will follow the intended steps and interact with the tool correctly. You’ll have the tools that the best project apps utilize, like:

Buttons to add new

Projects⁠

⁠

User-specific

Views⁠

My Projects⁠

Admin settings (so your teammates won’t make accidental changes)

No more Wild West of project tracking.

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Unfocused → Personalized

Everyone gets their way, without having to copy/paste or use their own tools. From one

Projects⁠

table, each team gets their own

Views⁠

and stakeholders can see high-level updates with

Charts⁠

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Ugly → Delightful

Coda gives you the power to communicate and collaborate more clearly and delightfully ー from the small things (like adding fun icons in your

project phases⁠

) to the big things (like adding popping visuals, such as presenting the

timeline as a gantt chart⁠

at your check-in meeting).

Pestering your team to update a spreadsheet sucks. With Coda, teams at Figma and Four Kitchens enjoy using their docs and syncing up. With the right tool, your unique way of doing things becomes a keystone to your success.

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Common FAQs about portfolio management templates

How do you build a portfolio management system?

You need to first identify the resources you have in your organization. This means creating an inventory of all your active projects and establish the common strategy each of these projects should work towards. Once you've listed all your resources, analyze the various metrics of your projects to find areas overlap or inefficiencies.

Once you have all this data in hand about your organization's projects, it's time to communicate with other stakeholders your findings and recommended strategy. Once everyone is on the same page, you can use this portfolio management template to manage the PPM process and change processes as necessary.

What are the 6 steps to successful portfolio management?

Communicate results of your PPM process - This enables you to get further buy-in from management and stakeholders on your portfolio strategy.

Manage resource allocation dynamically - While your strategy stays fixed, competing priorities and risks will pop up. Knowing how to allocate resource effectively ensures your projects will move along smoothly. Here’s a template for

resource allocation / capacity planning⁠

Remove information silos - Tools like this portfolio management template allow anyone in your organization to get visibility into the projects, resources, and people who are helping you achieve your strategies.

Put your stakeholders first - Just like customers, your strategies should be framed in a way that benefits your internal and external stakeholders.

Continually evaluate progress - The portfolio dashboard in this template allows you to evaluate progress of your project teams daily. This gives you a pulse on how your teams are functioning in case you need to make any changes.

Create a meeting cadence - Your project teams and executive stakeholders will want to meet to discuss the progress of projects and program goals. Creating a consistent cadence of meetings and check-ins ensures everyone stays in the loop on the progress of your portfolio.

What is product portfolio management?

Product portfolio management focuses on the management of an organization's product lines or portfolio of products. Unlike a product manager, a product portfolio manager has to analyze each product in the organization's product line and understand how they are related to each other and if there are any overlaps in terms of resources and processes. The product portfolio manager will decide how to best allocate resources between the different products.

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What is a portfolio management template?

How to use this portfolio management template?

Step 1: Set up teams and phases

Step 2: Establish the mission and vision

Step 3: Oversee projects

Step 4: Track weekly meeting notes

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Who should use this portfolio management template?

Problems with existing free templates

Solution

Disconnected → Collaborative via A Central Hub