Using portfolio buckets (or short buckets), you can structure a portfolio hierarchically. The portfolio and its buckets are called standard portfolio. At the bucket level, you can perform strategic, financial, and capacity planning, or analyze the financial and capacity data of assigned portfolio items in an aggregated manner. A bucket always belongs to a portfolio.
How you structure your portfolio using buckets depends on your requirements. For example, the structuring can be done according to the organizational or functional point of view, and can include any number of levels.
Make a note the following points when structuring a portfolio using buckets:
- You can assign portfolio items and initiatives only to those buckets that were not already subdivided by other buckets. Directly under a bucket, you can either have only portfolio items and initiatives, or only buckets.
- When you create a bucket, it inherits the authorizations of higher-level objects. However, you can supplement, change, or remove these inherited authorizations if necessary.
- You cannot subsequently reassign a bucket. This means that you can neither change the assignment of a bucket within the portfolio structure, nor can you assign a bucket to another portfolio.
- In addition to the hierarchical grouping of portfolio items using buckets, you can also use collections to analyze portfolio items together that are assigned to different buckets of a portfolio.
Just like portfolios, buckets are also typically created by the PPM administrator. When you create a new bucket, you decide where the bucket is to be inserted within the portfolio structure.
The following options are available when creating a bucket:
- You can create the new bucket directly below the portfolio, that is, at the highest level of the portfolio structure.
- You can create a new bucket below the current bucket.
- You can create a bucket, and select the parent bucket manually from the list of all the buckets of the current portfolio.
Bucket Details
The data that you enter in a bucket is spread across the following different tab pages:
- General Information tab page:
On theGeneral Information tab page, you must enter a name, the external identification, and the status. Administrative data, such as the creation date or last change date, is updated by the system when you save the changes. The higher-level object in the portfolio structure hierarchy, the number of assigned portfolio items and reviews are also automatically determined by the system. You can also enter a description for a bucket.
- Financial and Capacity Information tab page:
On the Financial and Capacity Information tab page, all fields are mandatory fields. You use these fields to control the time period for which financial and capacity planning is possible for a bucket. You can also specify which currency, which capacity unit, and which period breakdown is used for financial and capacity planning by default.
- Authorizations tab page:
On the Authorizations tab page, you can assign new authorizations or change inherited authorizations.
- Notes tab page:
When you enter notes using the Notes tab page of a bucket, notes are automatically supplemented with information about who entered them and the entry time and date.
- Field Service Configuration tab page:
On the Field Service Configuration tab page, you can define which questionnaires or scoring models are to be available with which fields of the assigned portfolio items. You define in Customizing for PPM the fields that are to be available here for configuration.
In addition to the data listed in the figure, you can also plan financial and capacity data for a bucket.